I just bought a computer lot for faily cheap and I have two Pentium III xeon servers, but without processors... there are two Pentium III Xeon Porcessors (1ghz each) and the time is about up on the auction...does anyone know how these processors perform?...and why the higher the clock frequency, the lower the L2 Cache? I saw several 550mhz Xeons that had 512kb, 1mb or even 2mb of cache...but nothing over 256kb for the pentium III xeon (900mhz and up) processors...anywhere. I plan to load up on ram, too. Maybe 1 gig for starters... Anyone have any input? I figure someone here has used them before... is it worth $25 for two PIII Xeon's? THanks! p.s.-- Would it be better to go with a lower clock frequency and have a higher cache or lower cache with a higher clock frequency?...and are there any 1ghz xeons with an L2 cache higher than 256kb?
It sounds like someone slapped Xeon at the end of the Pentium III thing. The Xeon's in the Pentium II/III era were all slot 2-based, and were taller SECC units than their Slot 1 counterparts. If the pics look like they're regular PIII's, then they're definitely the regular Pentium III's. However, you can still run them in SMP with a dual Slot 1 motherboard.
Most PIII Xeons were 256kb, they did a 500mhz with 512kb and 500, 550 and 700mhz processors with both 1mb and 2mb L2 cache. The 900mhz Xeon had a 2mb L2 cache. The long and short is that the ones with a bigger cache (inc the 512kb 500mhz) were 100mhz FSB whereas the ones with the smaller cache were 133mhz. Your best bet if you want a high clock frequency and big cache is the 900mhz Xeon, it had a 2mb L2 cache. Note that everything above 600mhz with the PIII Xeons were built on the Cascades design (as opposed to the Tanner) These were 2.8v which is quite a bit more than the 2.0v Tanners.... make sure you board can supply 2.8v. The Cascades had nearly three times as many transistors and the die was 20% smaller than the Tanner. Cascades had a thermal design far lower than the Tanner, only 55'c.... Im sure this caused problems in the past!
