As Intel has pushed their .25 micron manufacturing technology further and further into the MHz stratosphere, it's become clear to us that overclocking their CPUs to levels much higher than their stock speeds is becoming increasingly difficult.

There are many reasons for the barriers to higher than stock speeds which we've explained in our CPU overclocking guides, but the biggest two when it comes to the P3 line are their core yield quality and their L2 cache speeds.

Quite simply, at nine million transistors no two CPUs are alike, even two that are marked to run at 600MHz. Some are superior to others, and overclocking them is an easier task.

Likewise, the L2 cache on a P3 CPU is similarly limited to perform at the speed it was designed to operate. On the P3-600 CPU the L2 cache must run stabily at a level of one half of the core speed of the chip, in the case of the P3-600 that equals 300MHz. Push the P3-600 to 672MHz and you force the L2 cache to run at 336MHz, which is over 10% faster than it is rated.

Still, overclocking the new P3-600 is not impossible, and thus we set about to push it to its peak level while maintaining endless system stability.

When using the new MicroStar MS-6163 V2.0 mainboard, here are the possible overclocking options that its front side bus speed options will allow a user to define that are relevant to a P3-600 CPU:

Stock:		6.0 x 100MHz	=	600MHz
		6.0 x 103MHz	=	618MHz
		6.0 x 105MHz	=	630MHz
		6.0 x 110MHz	=	660MHz
		6.0 x 112MHz	=	672MHz
		6.0 x 115MHz 	=	690MHz
		6.0 x 117MHz	=	702MHz