I'm thinking of getting an old p3 or celeron chip and overclocking it as they cost less than a tenner and could be a bit of fun. Anyway, does anyone know which is the best P3 or celeron chip to overclock? which has the biggest gains...

as usual any info would be fab!"

well if you want to spend $100-$200 get a Tualitan core 1.4ghz P3 (double cache and superior core) plus the socket adapter (it wont work in regular socket 370 but socket adpater is like $5)

if not i have succesfully overclocked a P3 1.0ghz Slot 1-based system's CPU to 1.36ghz...

older technology is the s---; keep it running

If your motherboard supports Tualatin core CPUs, no adapter would be needed.

I'd recommend a Tualatin Celeron. Since they are meant to run on 100 MHz bus, they have higher multipliers. With only a slight increase in voltage, you can run them at 133 MHz instead. They only have 256K L2, compared to the Tualatin P3s 512. But they have the same L2 as Coppermine P3s.

The best overclocker would be the followings...

Coppermine Core 0.18
Celeron 566 -> 100x8.5 = 850Mhz Stock voltage 112 x 8.5 = 952Mhz with +0.1-0.2v incrase and max at 133 x 8.5 = 1130Mhz with +0.3-0.5v with good cooling...

Celeron 600 -> 100x9 = 900Mhz with +0.1v 112x9 = 1008 (May be sucessful but need to check out ur CPU steppings)

Pentium III 500E/550E/600E (100Mhz FSB Coppermine core)
500E could do 150x5 = 750... But you will have AGP/PCI problems with older motherboards where AGP only has 2/3 divider, resulting 100Mhz AGP bus when set to 150Mhz.... I seen a guy modified the voltage regulator on his EPOX BX motherboard and able to raise his VIO voltage to 4.35V and set the CPU voltage to 2.05v... He got 199x5 = 995Mhz... But system is not very stable due to memory limitation...

550E and 600E is ok but the best of them all is Celeron 566Mhz...

TMP-Man

Asus A7V classic rev 1.05
Athlon XP 2100+ @ 129x17 = 2195Mhz 1.81v
768MB PC133 RAM @ 129Mhz 2-2-2
40GB 540RPM + 120GB 7200RPM HD
128MB Radeon 9500 mod 9700 @ 300/300