To: Paul Engel who wrote (53752 ) 4/17/1998 9:56:00 AM From: Jim McMannis Read Replies (2) | Respond to of 186894
Paul, Celeron not bad if it's overclocked? From Toms hardware... "Intel Celeron - The New Gaming CPU of Choice, Overclocker's Dream Most of the press doesn't like the Celeron, but this seems to me mainly due to the old fashionedness of the journalists who write about CPUs. As a matter of fact I really do like this CPU and I am absolutely sure that it has a good position in the market place. Celeron's lack of a L2 cache is the reason why it doesn't score high in office applications. However it pretty much performs as well as a Pentium MMX 233. The powerful FPU of the Deschutes core is responsible for a gaming performance which is far ahead of any Socket 7 CPU, including even overclocked Pentium MMX CPUs. This makes it a very cheap CPU for excellent game playing. Now since this CPU is targeted for the home market we shouldn't emphasize on the office application performance. How fast do you want to run your spread sheet or Winword? Does it make a difference how fast the CPU is waiting for the next user input? I dare doubting that. Everthing in the PC business is revolving around 3D nowadays, e.g. the next Intel CPU core 'Katmai' will mainly enhance 3D gaming. So what is wrong with a CPU that doesn't score astronomical Winstones, but scores excellent Quake II scores? The biggest beauty of Celeron however is how wonderful you can overclock it. My Celeron runs up to 400/100 MHz flawlessly!!! Is that surprising? No! The most touchy thing of a Pentium II is not the core but the L2 cache. Celeron doesn't have any, which makes it overclockable up to 50% of its official clock rate. Even if Intel should disable higher multipliers, Celeron will still run 400/100, because it's the same multiplier as used for 266. My Celeron runs with multipliers of up to x5. So if you want the most fps per buck, go and get a Celeron. Buy a cheap BX board that offers you 100 MHz front side bus if you're really crazy, or get a really cheap EX board with sound and vga onboard, add a Voodoo2 card and you've got a cheap and powerful Quake II station. The Celeron offers by far the best gaming performance for the money whilst also offering a satisfying office application performance. If you're into overclocking you will love this CPU." -------------------------------------------------------------------- So the gamers can buy the Celeron and overclock it in a BX motherboard. Is this good news for Celeron sales? Maybe. Good for Intels bottom line? Maybe not. I'm wondering if the HP, Compaq, Pac Bell, Celeron systems are over clockable. Now if someone can figure out a way to link an L2 cache to the Celeron... Jim