Written: 10/26/2000

Reviewer: Tron®    

Provided by: Overclock Warehouse  

Price:  $195 (Use coupon code "Techzone" for $20 off here)

Introduction

Celeron2's. The little engine that could.  66mhz FSB, and new cache restrictions. Run stock, these are really mediocre processors. But who said we had to run anything stock here? :) Overclock Warehouse slings us a Celeron2 600 with a guaranteed overclock to the magic 1Ghz mark and a Global Win FOP38 super cooler. Let's find out how high it flies. Big "shout out" to Dave at Overclock Warehouse for sending us this bundle to evaluate!!

Celeron's have always been the darling of the overclocking crowd, always bringing more "bang for your buck" with few if little tradeoffs. Intel unfortunately recognized this, and with the Celeron2's took steps to re-establish the Celeron2 as their low end market processor.

Compared to the FCPGA Intel Pentium3 there are similarities, and there are differences. Both are FCPGA "flip chip" processors, with the die located on the top of the socket package, without the familiar thermal interface slug covering the core. They are based on basically the same core process, with the Celeron2 inheriting SSE support as a bonus. There are 3 areas in a stock Celeron2 that are designed to lessen their performance and position them as low end market products.

1. Multiplier's and FSB speeds. Our Celeron2 here runs at 600mhz stock, giving us a 9.5 multiplier on a measly, last generation 66mhz bus. This can be dealt with however.

2. Smaller L2 cache. The Celeron2's have 1/2 the Level2 cache of their big brother's, the Pentium3's. This is not necessarily as bad as it seems. At least the L2 in both is running at core speed, and not every application or game will benefit much from the larger L2 in the P3, as much as it would seem.

3. Less associative cache. Because of the way the L2 is cut in half on the Celeron2 (compared to it's same core cousin, the P3) you end up with a 4-way set associative cache, as opposed to the 8-way set associative cache. Decreasing the degree of associativity ends up increasing the L2 cache "miss rate" which can hamper performance. 

What this comes down to in plain English, for the overclocker, is that if you are able to clock-for-clock match a P3 with a Celeron2, it is generally going to lag the P3 in some areas.

Of course one thing that goes a long way to alleviating this as a concern is a fact that even if there is a performance tradeoff clock-for-clock for the overclocker, it's made up in spades, for no other reason than the fact that a Celeron2 is CHEAP! Overclocking has always been about "bang-for-the-buck" and leveraging the process technology of the latest steppings from a manufacturer (see Moto's editorial about how overclocking often really isn't here ). And indeed overclocking is what this article is all about.

Next page: What you get

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