Intel Pentium III E FC-PGA (Socket-370)

From the general trend of this review most of you would think that there is no reason to even pay any attention to the FC-PGA Pentium III E, and if you’re buying a computer today, you’d be completely right.

With the i810E as its currently only available platform, the FC-PGA would only appeal to businesses that are looking for a low cost but high performing system, thus making the FC-PGA perfect, right? Wrong.

There is a little thing called the Celeron that we’d have to ignore if the FC-PGA were to be considered a good option for businesses looking for a low cost but high performing system. The fact of the matter is that the Celeron is a fast enough solution for most applications that the FC-PGA Pentium III E really has no purpose, as long as it is coupled with the i810E platform. If Socket-370 is your only option and you’re looking for performance, the Celeron 500 is probably a better option than the FC-PGA Pentium III 500E in terms of cost.  However, if you want something similarly priced to the Celeron yet faster in high end applications, the FC-PGA may interest you.  For most gamers and users however, you won't be too interested by the FC-PGA on the i810E. 

Then why waste time with this review? There is no difference between the FC-PGA Pentium III E and the Slot-1 Pentium III E other than the former being cheaper. So what we have here are two identical processors, one cheaper than the other, and the only thing preventing you from going out and purchasing the cheaper CPU is the fact that you’ll have to use an i810E motherboard, which is far from a high performing solution. What other options do we have?

For starters, it would take very little effort for a motherboard manufacturer to step in and update their Socket-370 designs with support for the VRM 8.4 design guidelines and offer support for the FC-PGA Pentium III E.

Here’s a question you’re probably asking: if ABIT modified the BP6 (Dual Socket-370 BX Motherboard) to support the FC-PGA Pentium III E, would it work with the FC-PGA in dual processor mode? According to Intel, no. But then again, according to Intel, the Socket-370 Celerons won’t work in dual processor mode either.

Unfortunately, we have no way of testing whether or not the FC-PGA chips are capable of running in dual processor mode. If you think about it, the FC-PGA version of the Coppermine core is no different from the SECC2 (Slot-1) version of the core and if one core is capable of working in dual processor mode, then the other one should be capable as well. At the same time, the FC-PGA has to be pin compatible with the Socket-370 Celeron so that both CPUs can be used interchangeably in a Socket-370 motherboard, so Intel could not have remapped the pins. The only possibility left is that Intel set the pin required for SMP operation to a disabled setting (SMP is enabled by default on Socket-370 Celeron CPUs but not "supported"). But with such a small population running their Celerons in dual processor mode, would Intel even spend the time to address the issue? Maybe and then again, maybe not.

The next option is the Apollo Pro 133A. We have already tested one motherboard that is based on the Apollo Pro 133A chipset; unfortunately, it did not support the VRM 8.4 specification and thus wouldn’t work with our FC-PGA CPU. The Apollo Pro 133A would be the closest match to the i820 in terms of available features. The chipset’s 133MHz FSB support could definitely come in handy if the 500Es ever made it up to 667MHz, which is entirely possible provided that the chips run cool enough. As far as the real overclocking potential of these chips is concerned, we’ll have to wait until more of them get into the hands of the users before we can make any final decisions.

As it stands right now, more platforms need to be made available before the FC-PGA Pentium III E can be recommended. Let’s just wait and see if any motherboard manufacturers step forward with the platform we’re looking for.