Proliant 5500 and 700MHz P3 Xeon

[David Fitzgerald_1]

I understand that the PL5500 has switch settings that would allow one to run the Pentium III Xeon at speeds up to 600 MHz. I've read the doc on mixing processors speeds/caches/steppings but have a question.

As 600 MHz chips only seem to come with a L2 cache of 256K, could I use say 700MHz chips with a 2MB L2 cache, even if I set the speed to 600MHz? Will the chips slow themsleves down to 600MHz? I intend to use 4 such chips.

As I currently have CPUs running @ 500MHz with L2 cache of 512K, would running 500MHz chips with 1M or 2M L2 cache be worthwhile? Used chips seem cheap and available.