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1.13GHz P3 system DOA

It wasn't us, pleads leading UK monthly

Regular hardware site junkies will recall the Good Doctor Tom's trials and tribulations in trying to get Intel's 1.13GHz Pentium III to work properly. Well, The Reg can go one better - our 1.13GHz system was dead on arrival.

Intel sent us one of its vanilla systems, using a Vancouver 820 mobo with 128Mb of PC800 Rambus. We took it out of its box and gaped in awe at the colossal fan stuck on the side of the system unit, in addition to a smaller one on the back panel, the one in the power supply and another on the graphics card. Not since early Russian nuclear reactors have we seen so much active cooling.

The giant fan has a duct to draw air from the large passive heatsink attached to the CPU, while the fan on the back of the system unit was set to suck air into the box.

But it was unfortunately all in vain as the system refused to power up. A lesser Slot One P3 was tried and worked perfectly. Refitting the 1.13 provided a slight improvement - the front panel power switch now started all the fans spinning, but that was all.

Now we have a sneaking suspicion that this probably isn't entirely down to Intel.

Chipzilla arranged to have the system shipped directly to us from one of the UK's leading monthly PC Mags. Suspecting that perhaps a terrible accident had occurred, such as leaving the monstro fan off while the system was running, thus cooking the hapless processor, we checked with their labs guys, and asked if the system had left them in working order.

"To be honest, we didn't even take it out of the box," replied their labs supremo. "We only test OEM systems you can buy, not manufacturer built test systems."

So how then do we explain the presence of this magazine's proprietary benchmarking suite on the dead system's hard drive?

Spooky, eh?

Don't worry guys, your secret is safe with us. (payment to the usual address, please) ®

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