Intel Pentium III
The Intel Pentium III is the successor to the Pentium II. It was released in 1999 and essentially adds the SSE instruction set and increases the frequency.
They were firstly available as 450 MHz parts, then parts up to 1.4 GHz were released. The Pentium IIIs were firstly packaged in the form of cartridges like Pentium IIs, which were also normally inserted in the Slot 1. Then, Intel reverted back to socketed processors and the Pentium IIIs were inserted in the Socket 370.
There were three Pentium III generations. The first one are Katmai Pentium IIIs, manufactured with a 250 nm process and packaged in the form of Slot 1 cartridges on Desktop. It was followed by Coppermine Pentium IIIs made with a 180 nm process and for the Socket 370, and finally the 130 nm Tualatins, which were also inserted in the same socket, but required a new generation of motherboards. They could still be run on older ones with adapters or mods.
Slotkets could be used to run Socket 370 Processors on Slot 1 Motherboads.
- A 450 MHz Pentium III (SL364, Katmai). Back, Top. Malaysia, 1999 Week 12.
- A 500 MHz Mobile Pentium III (SL3DW, Katmai). Bottom. 1999 Week 39.
- A 500 MHz Pentium III (SL3Q9, Coppermine). Bottom. Malaysia, 1999 Week 52.
- A 1 GHz Pentium III (SL52R, Coppermine). Bottom. Costa Rica, 2001 Week 4.
- A 1.4 GHz Pentium III (SL5XL, Tualatin). Bottom. Malaysia, 2002 Week 26.
- Two Coppermine Dice.
The Pentium III is suceeded by the Pentium 4 released in 2000, and technically wise by the Pentium M in 2003.
Operating System Support
- A Pentium III will by itself not prevent any x86 Windows until 7 from running. Windows Vista and 7 officially require a 800 and 1 GHz CPU, but can actually work on slower Pentium IIIs. They however require the motherboard to have some ACPI compilance, and some early Slot 1 Motherboards might not support it.
- Aero will work properly with a supported graphics card.
- The Windows Experience Index assessment will work too. On Windows 7, the slowest Pentium IIIs will get a score below 1.0 (in a scale from 1.0 to 7.9!), glitching the main score page that will miss the values, which can only be read on the printable page.
- Some later Windows 7 updates will break support since they require SSE2.
- We are aware of a single instance of a Windows 8 running on a Pentium III, using a "W8CPUFeaturePatch" mod bypassing the NX and SSE2 requirements. However, we were never able to install nor run Windows 8 ourselves on any of our Pentium III machines and cannot confirm for sure the experiment, especially considering that we have not seen anyone else making a successful attempt.
- The Pentium III is still supported by the Linux Kernel, and Linux Distributions still supporting x86 should work on this CPU.