Hi Mephisto,
This is pretty much off-topic, but since you asked:
If you already have a PC, is there any reason why you cannot purchase Pentium III and install it yourself?
The answer is: you can only do that upgrade yourself in a minority of cases. You need a late-model Pentium II PC that uses the Intel BX chipset (or third-party equivalent). If you have anything earlier than that, it's no go, you need a new motherboard if you want Pentium III. (I assume you meant by your question "can I replace the CPU" rather than "can I replace the CPU and the motherboard and the case and the power supply").
In particular, you can never upgrade a Pentium to a Pentium III, regardless of MMX or all that, because the sockets are different. Also, except in a small number of weird cases, you can only upgrade a Pentium II to a Pentium III if the Pentium II runs at 350, 400 or 450Mhz (which means your motherboard has a BX-equivalent chipset). If you have a 233, 266, 300 or 333Mhz Pentium II, then your computer almost certainly has the older LX chipset. That chipset won't support Pentium III.
And to add insult to injury, even some BX motherboards will only support the 450Mhz Pentium III, because they don't have the right jumpers to support the faster 500Mhz Pentium III; they were built to support 450Mhz max. If you want the fastest new 500Mhz Pentium III, the odds are 95% that you have to buy a new computer.
In any case, the Pentium III is pretty much of a bogus introduction, like the Xeon. If you have a Pentium II, there's almost no reason at all to buy one now, because it gives you nothing new except those few instructions that no software vendors are using yet. In a year, you might want to upgrade when the Pentium III is up above 600Mhz, if you do something like editing video, heavy 3D gaming, or lots of speech recognition. By then the software will have come out for it, and in any case those applications should always be running on the fastest thing available (like an Ultra :-). As far as "improving your web experience", that's false. Your web experience will be improved by DSL 1,000 times more than it will ever be improved by Pentium III.
Sorry for too long of an off-topic blab; but Intel drives me nuts with their hype.
Regards,
--QwikSand |
