Need more guidance with BH6

[Guest]

I have a BH6 MB and have updated my bios so it can support up to a PIII 850. I have read all the discussions on the BH6 and am still unsure what processor I should choose to do my upgrade. I currently run a PII 350 w/384 MB pc100 Micron ram. Wont the PIII 850 Coppermine give me better performance and stability than an over clocked or similar speed Celeron? Also I have searched to find what the difference is between the slot 1 and the FCPGA 370. Is there an advantage in using the slot 1 processor other than dealing with a slot key? Thanks in advance for any input!

 

[Guest]

Yes - a coppermine 850 WILL give you better performance than an overclocked or similar speed celeron. The celeron is crippled by its tiny L2 cache, and as such, is cheaper, and slower.
Difference between slot 1 and FC-PGA? Zip! Performance of the 2 architectures are exactly the same - this means you are better off acquiring a Slot1 motherboard (which you have) as it can accomodate both slot1 and fc-pga processors, where the socket370 motherboards can only accept fc-pga.
My advice is to get a 800e slot1, and overclock it to as close to a Ghz as you can. Or get the 850 slot1 and be content with it at stock speed. I will say this though - the 100fsb coppermines are in scarce supply these days - 133 is becoming the standard. So if you are going to get one - be quick!
Good luck

 

[Guest]

since you have a healthy amount of pc-100 sdram i would suggest buying a p3-800e or a p3-850e ... overclocking is never guaranteed, (although i am an avid oc'er) and anything other than 66, 100, or 133 will mess up the timing to the pci bus ... 133 will oc the agp to ~89mhz (well above spec of 66mhz) ... while many devices work very well in an oc'd system everytime something starts to go wrong you have to find out if the oc is the issue ... stick with the specs and a bh6 with a slot1 p3 will take you far into the next round of processors and motherboards.

Regards,
Chas