Technically either should work. I don't think one design is really any better than the other as neither really get hot enough to justify it.

Don't forget that some boards will run unsupported cpu's just fine as well. The only real way to know is to try it and benchmark it to see if it worked.

There is no difference between the too voltage wise but the ceramic will have less room to overclock from my own testing, the plastic ones with the IHS often have fantastic margins that I wish that modern hardware had.

Intel switched over to the plastic package because the original P200 (non MMX version) apparently ran too hot for the ceramic one. I have no idea why MMX chips were produced in ceramic packages. Maybe it was just to use up some leftover material?

The first computer I bought had a Pentium MMX 166 processor (ceramic, retail box).

After having owned it for a few months, I tried increasing the multiplier on the motherboard to make it run at 200MHz. It ran fine, so after a while I made it run at 233MHz. No problem at all.

The desire to get more performance for free led me to discover a special jumper on my I will motherboard that was labeled TEST. Using it changed the bus frequency to 75MHz and I had myself a stable Pentium 266 MMX which you couldn't buy retail at the time.

I know my story might be anecdotal and, perhaps, more of an exception than the rule, but nevertheless is true.

Anonymous Coward wrote:

Intel switched over to the plastic package because the original P200 (non MMX version) apparently ran too hot for the ceramic one. I have no idea why MMX chips were produced in ceramic packages. Maybe it was just to use up some leftover material?

It's possible they used the leftover materials for the slower chips. It might also be so Intel could more easily keep up production rate by using the Pentium non-MMX packaging infrastructure for a little while longer.

The PPGA chips have better thermal conductivity and that design was kinda reused when Intel started manufacturing s370 Celerons. The CPGA chips were usually the slower MMX models, so these didn't need to be the faster models anyway.

Once inside a rig it wouldn't matter which packaging your CPU uses, both should perform identical.

Unless you want to overclock them 😁

I love the look of ceramic CPUs, but you normally don't buy CPUs to look at them.