The first generation Intel 810 chipset was really designed for the Celeron processors. Because of this, the 810 front side bus (FSB) was limited to 66/100MHz. The Intel 810E (E for enhanced) removes this limitation by allowing the FSB to run at 66/100/133MHz.

In addition to the faster FSB, the Intel 810E chipset will support both the socket 370 PPGA (plastic pin grid array) and FC-PGA (flip chip-pin grid array) form factor. The PPGA is the form factor used by today's Celeron processors. But for the Pentium III Coppermine processors, Intel will use their new FC-PGA socket 370 form factor instead (see picture above). The FC-PGA allows Intel to reduce cost and the processor's thermal output. Intel will also be migrating their Celeron line to this new FC-PGA form factor.

The primary difference between the PPGA and FC-PGA form factor is the voltage requirement. Most Intel 810 based motherboards are designed with the PPGA voltage requirement; therefore, those motherboards will NOT BE ABLE TO USE THE FC-PGA PROCESSORS (BE IT PENTIUM III COPPERMINE OR CELERONS). There are some exceptions because some motherboard manufacturers may modified the voltage requirement on Intel 810 based board to accomodate the FC-PGA processors. But in most cases, it's best to use a board based on the Intel 810E chipset instead; because you get support for the 66/100/133MHz FSB.

For review, below is the table that shows the features of each processor:

Features	Celeron	Coppermine
Front Side Bus	66MHz	100/133MHz
L1 Cache	64K	64K
L2 Cache	128K	256K
L2 Cache Speed	Full CPU Speed	Full CPU Speed
Multimedia	MMX	MMX/SSE
Interface	Socket 370	Slot 1 Socket 370
Micron	0.25	0.18
Maximum Speed	533MHz	600+MHz

The maximum speed of each processor is as of 11/30/1999. Intel will no doubt be ramping up the speed in the near future.

Let's look at the performance comparison between the socket 370 Celeron CPUs and the socket 370 Pentium III "Coppermine" processor. Here is the the test system configuration:

Component	Celeron/Pentium III System
Motherboard	PREMIO CS2
Chipset	Intel 810E
Memory	Kingston 64MB PC133 SDRAM DIMM
BIOS Version	Award version 1.5B4 - 11/01/1999
HDD	Western Digital 27GB 7,200RPM ATA-66 (WD273BA)
Video	Intel Direct AGP (4MB buffer)
Operating Systems	Windows 98SE and NT 4.0 Workstation SP5

The following table summarizes the Celeron and Coppermine Pentium III FC-PGA processors used in this test. (Officially, the fastest Pentium III FC-PGA is 550MHz, as of 11/30/1999; unofficially, it's possible to overclock the CPU up to 700MHz for benchmarking purposes ONLY.):

Processor	L2 Cache	Front Side Bus (FSB)
Celeron/366	128K	66MHz
Celeron/400	128K	66MHz
Celeron/433	128K	66MHz
Celeron/466	128K	66MHz
Celeron/500	128K	66MHz
Celeron/533	128K	66MHz
P3/500 FC-PGA	256K	100MHz
P3/550 FC-PGA	256K	100MHz
P3/600 FC-PGA	256K	100MHz
P3/650 FC-PGA	256K	100MHz
P3/700 FC-PGA	256K	100MHz

Ziff-Davis Winstone 99 measures overall system performance by running through a series of commonly used business and engineering applications. Likewise, Winbench 99 measures the performance of a specific part of the system; such as video or hard disk drive performance. Higher numbers are better.

The graph above shows the relative performance between the Celeron 366-533MHz CPUs (orange bars) against the Coppermine Pentium III at 500-700MHz (green bars). The test suite is Winstone 99 under Windows 98SE. As expected, due to the larger L2 cache and higher clock speeds, the Pentium III CPUs easily beat the Celeron processors. Even the PIII/500 FC-PGA is faster than the higher clock speed Celeron/533.

Under Windows NT 4.0 workstation, the performance gap between Celeron and Pentium III is even greater. This is due to the fact that the NT applications are more CPU intensive than those tested under Windows 98SE.

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