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Pastimes : Dream Machine ( Build your own PC ) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: halfscot who wrote (1893)	8/11/1998 4:36:00 PM
From: Dirk Hente	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 14778

halfscot, I think the celeron 266 is the top choice for overclockers (at least I you dont have the chance to test your cpu before you pay). Here is why: The celeron with L2 cache is not so perfect, because it has a cache. The cache seems to be THE critical element for the maximum clock frequency. Remember that the top speed processors have different L2 chips but the same core. Why not a 300MHZ celereon? It has something to do with the fixed multiplier settings. All Celerons seem to have a fixed multiplier setting of 4 (266=4x66) and 4.5 (300=4.566). This means if you are using a 300MHz celeron and a FSB clock of 100MHZ your CPU clock is 4.5100=450. Thats nice, but its at the top limit and what are you going to do if your processor fails? You have to reduce the FSB clock. Well, the next lower possible step is: 4.5*83=375. Not only that you are now quite below 400 (taking the 266 celeron as a reference here which easily runs at 400) it has more 'negative' side effects: the clock speed for PCI and AGP are changed as well. It actually depends on your mobo 'flexibility' wrt multiplier settings whether this is a problem or not: Using a P2B mobo, with a FSB frequency of 83Mhz your PCI bus is clocked at 41.65Mhz which is above spec (another source of potential instability for your system). The good thing about the 266 Mhz celeron is, that is has no L2 cache and the there is still some 'room' to the upper 450Mhz limit. BTW, its a bit tedious to calculate all multiplier/frequency combinations, but i found a nice web site where you can get a listing of all possible combinations covering FSB, CPU, PCI, AGP & ISA clock frequencies: bunt.com Another very uselful celeron overclocking site is: jps.net Interesting to note is, that a lot of Celeron overclocking activities are going on in Japan. I found a lot of sites there but unfortunately (for me) everything is in japanese: hp.vector.co.jp An experiment about a failed dual-celeron can be found here: kikumaru.w-w.ne.jp Does this all really makes sense wrt performance? If you are a 3d gamer no doubt..yes. But if you never play 3D games (like me)? It seems that you are getting at least a PII 266 Mhz performance for office applications (see the business winstone98 test at tomshardware.com But with a floating point performance of a PII 400Mhz this is a quite perfect combination.