Differences between Pentium II & III

[flupke]

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

[spazmire11]

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.

[puntoMX]

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 .

[ssmokee]

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).

[flupke]

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.

[ripken204]

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.

[ssmokee]

Maybe the SR440BX only supports the slowest.

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

[puntoMX]

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.