P3 prices, and what's this Xeon?

Fand

I was all happily set up to buy a P3 1GHz processor from Dabs.com for stg£171, but it seems to be gone from the page; the only 1GHz P3 they have now is a Pentium Xeon, and it's stg£365.

Why so dear, what's the difference, and where can I get a 1GHz P3 for a more reasonable price?

Canaboid

The Xeon is intels server processor. It has a larger/faster cache and is more expensive as you have noticed. There shouldn't be any problem sourcing a standard PIII from Scan or elswhere. I assume you already have a motherboard but if not consider an Athlon solution as they are a bit better on price/performance.

Fand

Yeah, I have a CUSL2-C motherboard, which will take *up* to a 1GHz P3.

What's this Scan, please?

Gerry

www.scan.co.uk

The 1ghz xeon is not any faster, it is just capable of working in a 4 cpu multiprocessor system. It still has the same amount of cache. The p3 xeon is a slot2 processor anyway, and so would not fit in your board.

SickBoy

Gerry, I'm almost certin that Xeon's can have up to 2meg of cache. No bog standard P3 has that.

Gerry

yep, notice that I said the 1ghz xeon. The 2 megs of cache only applies up to 700mhz, and I think you can now get a 1 meg 900mhz xeon.

Stephen

Xeons are available with as little as 256kb cache too. I have one (866mhz) - impossible to find a second one to go in my dual xeon board

Fand

What difference does the cache make, please?

And where could I look for a 1GHz P3? Anyone know? At a decent price - not so cheap it's suspicious, but not stg£300 either.

chernobyl

cache is the final storage for programs to be/and are just processed, it works directly from RAM and the more of it you have the faster your programs/operations can be processed, up to a certian degree.

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Ashley Lyn

Ashley Lyn Cafagna

Gerry

L2 cache is a small amount of very high speed memory, which on the p3 (coppermine and xeon), thunderbird and duron, is located on the cpu itself. The cpu can store frequently used instructions and data here, and access them within a few clock cycles. This greatly improves performance because the cpu does not have to wait for main memory (ram), which could take hundreds of clock cycles.

Adding extra l2 cache is expensive because it increases the size of the chip, and because the chip now has many more transistors, the yield (proportion of processors on a wafer which pass testing) is much lower. So this drives up the cost further.

fands, I already gave the url for scan. Just to make it even easier,

http://www.scan.co.uk/allprice.htm#36

And you will want to get this one:

1.0GHz 133MHz Intel Pentium® III 256K - FCPGA 149.00 175.08



[This message has been edited by Gerry (edited 21-08-2001).]

Fand

Ah. I went to www.scan.co.uk, and it looked really interesting, but then, being a cautious soul, I went to www.resellerratings.com and looked up Scan International - click on View beside the name. Now it looked a whole lot *less* interesting. Take a look and tell me what you think.