Intel Pentium III 533B & 600B

Intel was right on the money with their greater bandwidth vs higher latency argument with RDRAM, the Pentium III 600B and the 533B clearly outpace the Pentium III 600.  This is, once again, a result of the greater memory transfer rates and the 133MHz FSB.  

Since the Pentium III 600B is essentially the regular Pentium III 600 with a new clock multiplier setting, the overclocking potential is the same but it is limited by the fact that the 600B uses a 4.5x clock multiplier. This leaves out the 110/112MHz FSB settings that you’re used to, but then again, there is no point in underclocking from the 133MHz FSB now is there?

The most common FSB settings you’ll see on 820 boards are the 138MHz, 143MHz, 148MHz and the 150MHz FSB setting. Using those settings, all of which run fine with most AGP cards, the Pentium III 533 should have no problem hitting 572MHz (143MHz x 4) or if you’re lucky 592/600MHz (148/150MHz x 4).

The Pentium III 600B finds its overclocking sweet spot at around the 660MHz mark, with the 666MHz (148MHz x 4.5) setting pushing its limits without having to add some heavy cooling to your system. Using the 143MHz FSB doesn’t really offer that big of a performance increase, but the 644MHz overclock shouldn’t be that difficult to achieve.

The transition to a 0.18-micron process will help the overclockability of the Intel processors quite a bit but, right now, that doesn’t help us. As we’ve known for some time, the 600MHz mark is pretty much the ending point for the yields we’re used to on Intel’s 0.25-micron process with the Pentium III.