Hi

We have a 7 year old pc here, with an Intel SR440BX motherboard. It came with 64MB 100MHz RAM, now it has 128MB 133MHz + 256MB 133MHz RAM, offcourse working at 100MHz because the board only supports 66 & 100 MHz. The cpu is an Pentium II 400MHz. Now I found a second hand Pentium III 550MHz for only a couple of €'s. The maximum the board can handle is a Pentium III 600MHz. Will there be a noticable gain in performance? It's only 150MHz difference but maybe the PIII has some more features. We don't need to buy a new pc or spend a lot of money on it because it's doing fine what we want it to do: scanning, printing, office, windows xp, internet. If we can boost performance with only a few €'s it would be nice.

Thanks

well a 150mhz increase is certanly great at that rate almost a 50% increase in processing power, the pIII's had something over the pII's, so if its cheap id do it.

It will give you some extra SSE instructions, so multimedia apps will run smoother. to bad it´s an INTEL board else you could OC it easely to 120~133MHz bus .

There are two types of p3's with different cores, Katmai's and Coppermine's. Get the Coppermine version if you can (it has faster L2 cache).

Thank you guys for your response. I will try to get this stuff, the owner didn't respond yet though. I don't really have the choise between Katmai and Coppermine, this information is most of the time not known. Maybe the SR440BX only supports the slowest.

come on! 400mhz is a blessing! lol

my dads comp is ~7-8 yrs old and has a 350mhz pII and we upgraded the ram to 3x128mb. i made a nice nlited xp for it and it runs amazing.

Maybe the SR440BX only supports the slowest.

That board should be able to run upto a 650MHz coppermine I think. See this article.

Lazy intel gives this. I´m almost sure it will work up to 900MHz with 100MHz FSB, only Microcodes are not update so it could be seen as unknown processor.