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Celeron 2 Overclocking
James Yu writes: "FiringSquad has a new overclocking report on the new Intel Celeron 2 processors. These new Celerons are based on the Pentium 3 Coppermine core, but only have half the L2 cache (128KB instead of 256KB). We were able to get one of our 566MHz chips all the way to 901MHz. Sounds like it could be the second coming of the 300A. "
These people claim claim to have overclocked a PIII 800Mhz, to 1438Mhz with use of Liquid N2. You may have some trouble reading the page, as it uses japanese fonts, but that is _damn_ fast if it's true (any commentary on possibility, anyone?).
Well technically the only difference is a voltage regulation pin and doesnt look like abit can get around this with their older socket hardware.. Boards/Converters that are cross FCPGA/PPGA compatbile. Check powerleap.com for a FCPGA->PPGA converter. $25 a pop tho, if your gonna spend that much it might be worth a new motherboard..
dropn of #celeron(EFnet)
Months of research indicates that overclocking a dubious stock with intense hype may result in a severe meltdown.
Think about it. If AMD is holding back the Spitfire as it will most likely blow away or match the Athalon-Classic. The Athalon-Classic(no on die cache) competes well with the CuMine. This would lead one to believe that the thunderbird would take the lead of the market(excluding Mustang and Whilemette). Followed by the Spitfire. Folowed by CuMine and Athalon-Classic(at speeds where the cache multiplier isn't too much of a hinderance). Leaving CeleronII at the bottom of the market if it were not overclocked. Ofcourse, this is considering all clock speeds being equal. It would seem that intel is too busy concentrating on Itanium to pay much attention to the desktop market until now. We can only wait and see what Whilemette and sledgehammer will bring to the table.
Actually, Dell made money by courting AMD and renegotiating a lower per unit price from Intel. At least that's what the floor manager told me.
-A Coward from Dell Tech Support
Socket 7 doesn't provide signals for CPUs to invalidate each others' cache lines, and for two threads to disagree about the state of main memory would cause Bad Things. You could only make it work by disabling all onboard caches, after which I doubt you'd come out ahead. I think Socket 8 (for Pentium Pros) was used in SMP systems, but a single Athlon or P3 probably has much better bang/buck nowadays.
I'm really looking forward to SMP Athlon; they use Alpha's bus protocol, and each CPU gets a dedicated 200MHz pipe to the memory controller!
i would rather have a half-as-fast cpu with twice the L2... clockspeed isn't everything, esp for DSP algorithms..!
History repeats itself . . .
On some (but I don't think all) of the PDP-10 processors, the registers were also the first few words of memory. To get a speed boost, some programs would put critical code into these addresses.
TECO was one of these progrmas. Your familiar EMACS began life as extensions to TECO
Come to think of it, todays microcomputer caches will hold a large chunk of a PDP-10's main memory as welll . . It seems to me that in '84 or so my university upgraded to 512k, though I don't remember whether that was in 8 bit bytes or 36 bit words . . .
It wasn't so much IBM's design, but that the bios and msdos calls for IO were just plain too slow, which forced direct access to hardware.
Programs that didn't directly access the video hardware did not have a 640k limit. However, given that the available display adaptors had hard-wired addresses, once the industry started using direct acces, it was not possible to move the addresses of the video cards, which both the IBM design and msdos would have allowed.
If that is the case, then I will be able to upgrade when they get cheap enough (ie. the lowest priced Intel CPUs).
Any idea if that is feasible?
Apparently Intel wanted to make it impossible to build SMP systems using Celeron 2, but then, they also said this for the original Celeron...
Black holes occur when God divides by zero.
Nice article and all. I especially like the mater of fact approach. However did these goys notice the pattern in the benchmarks ? Those that are heavily dependent on the video card show the P3 killing the Celeron.
Not because it's a faster chip or anything. It just runs the bus at 100MHz to 133MHz. When they push the Celeron to the edge it has a bus speed of 106MHz. Video intensive benchmarks will be affected by what the external bus speed is at more than any other benchmark.
What I want to see is something pearly CPU intensive like a compilation benchmark. I build kdelibs in just under 2 hours on my P200 with 64 Megs. How long will it take on a Celeron@901MHz with 128 megs of RAM ?
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
This is definitely not the second coming of the 300A; I'm suprised to poster, who wrote the article, would say this. What made the 300A (and the 366, to some extent) beautiful was that it matched, sometimes even outperformed a P2 at equal clockrate. For about a quarter the price. It even matched P3s on non-SSE apps.
;)
They managed to pull some incredible clockrates out of the FCPGA Celeries, but in no way are they comparable to an equal Pentium 3:
While the original Celeron 300A@450MHz offered the same performance as a similarly clocked Pentium II, we can see from the benchmarks that the new Celeron will be significantly slower than a Coppermine P3 of the same speed. At 901MHz, the Celeron only outperforms the P3 by a minimal amount.
It's still a pretty good deal; spend about $180 for a Celeron 566 vs. $230 for a P3-600 133mhz FSB. Just keep in mind that a P3-900, when it comes out, will mop the floor with your Celeron
--
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
The 8086 (and the 8 bit in/out version, the 8088) could address 1 MB of RAM. It was IBM's design choices, not Intel's, that created the 640K barrier. Of course, Microsoft's crystal ball was too cloudy to let them see what a liability it would be in the long run, either.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
In this gamepc.com review, they seem to think that "Intel has finally caught on and fully disabled SMP with this particular Celeron family", but I can't work out whether they're just being stupid (i.e., putting FC-PGA Celerons in a PPGA board and expecting them to 'just work'). Do you happen to have definitive information that the new Celerons can be run dual?
thanks,
Hamish
"Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something" - Plato
Well actually what I have is 2 IBM Netfinity 3500-M10 servers with a quarter gig ram and 3x9gig SCSI3 drives off a 2940U2W adapter, each. They don't officially support OC but can be made to work with some careful adjustments. My point is that upgrading now involves 2xcost of whatever Pent. you want to put in here vs. 1xcost of whatever you put in here. That's the hurdle rate eg. the least granular cost is 2x. You will always have to purchase two of something to continue to upgrade. Yes yes we all agree that 2x something is faster than 1x something but the cost committment is twice as large vs. using a single CPU machine, putting in a fast processor, overclocking it to say 70-75% of the raw combined speed of an SMP machine, running it until you want to either replace THAT with another CPU and/or something breaks/fries. With the money you save you could buy some solid state disk and blow the wheels off most anything.
SMP rarely if ever makes sense for most uses if you're using your own money. I have a couple of state-of-the-art P2-233 2way machines circa late 1998 that are now way too expensive to upgrade. At the time if you needed to be @ the edge of performance this is how you did it. But, and this is the problem, if I had waited maybe 2 months I wouldn't have had to get an SMP at all. You don't get any price/peformance improvement trying to upgrade an SMP box; either you have to get 2 less-than-the-latest CPUs for a dollar premium or you have to toss the MB and start over. Overall your best bet is to get the cheapest CPU, while spending some amount of money to overclock it a certain amount, certainly less than the absolutely achievable max speed since cooling and retro-engineering will cost too much. Then run that CPU as fast as possible until it fries and replace it with the cheapest CPU you can REASONABLY overclock at that point. Heck if you melt the MB or anything else just get another one since you don't have to pay the premium for SMP MBs or worry about drivers and whatnot. In real world tests of interactive performance people generally can't tell the difference between +- 15% and generally don't experience any benefit until +20% performance. So in the end the best bet is to effectively upgrade CPU performance to only 80% of the max achievable.
You've never seen OOG?!? He's one of the coolest posters on slash! Though he USES ALL CAPS, he's still one of the most insightful posters I've seen. Though the above posts (and this one) may be completely offtopic, please don't judge OOG badly. The caveman's my hero!
The bigger the on-die cache the more transistors on a chip. The more transistors on a chip the bigger the die size. The bigger the die size the lower the chip yield. The lower the yield the higher the price. The higher the price, the smaller the market.
Scuttlemonkey is a troll
Correct , but this is not enough to explain the performance difference. There is something else as well:
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
I read the inkiling of an article over at BP6.com that you could run the PIII FC-PGA in a BP6 with an adapter. I suspect that the same should be capable with the new celerons, still a newer board would be even nicer.
However, the most interesting thing I heard was this from ars
But there's more than higher clock speeds to these puppies. For one thing, they include the SSE instructions which, while they may or may not help you personally, definitely can't hurt to have. More importantly, they will be fabbed at 0.18 micron and include 256k of L2 cache. Now before anybody gets too excited, they plan to cripple them down to the standard 128k cache size. But if the BP6 showed us anything, it's that disabling can beundone... could be some exciting times ahead for overclockers...
Mmmmm. Imagine O/Cing one of these and enabling the crippled cache! Wooo!!!
I wonder if there is a serial number on these chips... Hmmm.
And finally, I know that someone is going to start posting how overclocking can destroy your chip YADDDA YADDDA YADDDA. Well I have heard it before and this Celery 300A @450 in my machine has not exploded yet. If you don't like overclocking, don't do it. Just don't tell others not to because you are not comfortable with it.
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!
I'd love to play around with some cheap SMP.
Is there anything besides the B6-P which is a cheap SMP board? Especially, is there any way to SMP slot7's?
Also, has anybody seen a cheap 4 or 8 way mobo?
thanks.
********* sig: If you don't like the law, get filthy stinking rich, and buy a better one.
But is the SMP disabled?
Can these run in an ABIT BP-6?
********* sig: If you don't like the law, get filthy stinking rich, and buy a better one.
It amazes me that many Intel chips now come with upwards of 512k (or more) of cache memory, which is the total amount memory that the original 8086 PC could support. You could run an old Lotus 123 program completely in the processor cache of a modern chip (including data and a bunch of TSRs). This really puts the infamous B. Gates quote, about no one needing more than 640k, into perspective.
"It's overkill, of course. But you can never have too much overkill." - Anonymous Slashdot Coward
They compare o/c celerys to Non-o/c p3s because when it comes to o/cing the issue is price. What gives you the most bang for the buck? If price wasn't an issue the p3 is almost always the obvious choice (except for 366 and 300a).
AMD spitfire chip is not out, cannot be purchased and is 100% speculation. Making it 0% worthwhile to speculate about. Bullshit.
It is -absolutely- worthwhile to speculate about this, because it's goign to be reality in less than 6 weeks, possibly no more than 3-4 weeks. It means something because -stock analysts- are actually paying attention to this sort of thing, as are folks who give a shit about their computing platforms.
Second, AMD has already demo'd Tbird at 1.1Ghz. All indications show that TBird will likely be at 1.4-1.6Ghz at the time Willamette is released (if you want to talk about vaporware...). All indications also show Spitfire outperforming, or being on par with, the current Athlon. We'd have Spitfire -now- if this weren't the case (the original launch date was Mid-April, it's been moved into May).
Speculation is what makes people rich, people with your attitude stay middle-class.
I'm sure you're correct, but I also believe this to be a marketing strategy. Remember the 486 line? The SX33 and the DX33 were the same chip with a little bit of doctoring done. The SX chips were simply DXs with the math coprocessor disabled. It was THERE, just (almost) impossible to use.
Intel could sell the SX line cheaper than the DX line, for home/unpower users, and sell the DX chips to business/high output (for the time) users.
One assembly line, two marketing campaigns.
I've never seen a post by OOG, and your comments are all i have to judge him/her on. So, I think OOG is a complete loser and a waste of time. Which makes your fanaticism quite funny.
Reading these, I think OOG would be disappointed with this troll poster I originally replied to.
Celery 2 has 256k of Cache, but 128k is permanently disabled because Intel wants to make sure that the Celeron perfoms worse than the P!!!. It is cheaper for them to do it this way too, rather than have two lines.
A small amount of fast L2 cache is faster than a large amount of slow L2 cache. However, you should start seeing L3 caches becoming common in upcoming Athlon systems... maybe 1 meg and higher!
EC
"...we are moving toward a Web-centric stage and our dear PC will be one of
EverCode
Ever since I got my new PIII, my computer is doing the strangest thing, does anyone else's computer .... talk to them? Mine's got an Intel pottie mouth.
NOW... in come the overclockers, and WOW, can these babies overclock!!!
Wow, did we read the same article? I was under the impression the article expressed a sense of disappointment that the celeron was so similiar to the coppermine. If anything the article convinced me that the celerons were "ho-hum" overclockers and weren't really worth the money, better to wait and see what is up AMD and Intel's sleeves.
Synopsis
The celeron version of the coppermine has recently been released. These guys wanted to Over clock two of them to see how they'd perform when compared to their higher cache counter parts. 2 566 celerons OC'd to 901mhz and 850mhz performed marginally better than a coppermine 650. The celeron un-overclocked performed much worse than the coppermine.
If any of this is wrong, its your fault... eyes on your own paper man.
Celery 2 has 256k of Cache, but 128k is permanently disabled because Intel wants to make sure that the Celeron perfoms worse than the P!!!. It is cheaper for them to do it this way too, rather than have two lines.
Nearly right. The real reason that it's much cheaper for them to do it this way is because often times they'll make a PIII and there'll be a fab problem somewhere on the 256k L2 cache. Used to be, that PIII was either destined for a lower speed bin (maybe the flaw won't cause failure at lower speeds), or for the trash. Now, they can just turn that half of the L2 off and sell it as a Celeron 2!
Thus, the cost savings isn't just from only having "one assembly line", but rather because they can salvage chips that would otherwise be tossed in the trash. Of course, they almost certainly have to purposely disable half the L2 of some perfectly good chips so that they have exactly as many Celeron 2's as marketing says they need on the market...but you get the idea.
If I take my four didgit serial numbered Commodore64 (S00006822) and
mount it ontop of a circa 1870 grandfather clock.
Then would I have the world's oldest overclocked machine.
OR would I have to dip the C64 in liquid hydrogen first?
There is nothing like a "Free Lunch"
Well its the truth, one of the main reason for killing the L2 Cache is that no one (thenormal users) cares about that number... the Processor speed on the other hand... now thats a seller!
On a more serious note, the L2 cache makes it more exp. to make chips, if it is kept at larger sizes and hence you see Intel and AMD making handstands to get away with using smaller Cache and still keep pushing up the Mhz Limit...
Non-Deterministic Finite Automata
WOW.... you know that all the Intel engineers knew that this could be done... BUT they advertise that the P3 is faster cause it can do PC100 / PC133 or Rambus speeds (Hell i aint seen one yet!!! I will tell you when i do). NOW... in come the overclockers, and WOW, can these babies overclock!!! So everyone (hackers and gamers) will realize that these chips rock and they will become more famous than the alternatives.
OK now here is what I love about Intel.. Gamers like em cause they overclock.. which is the coolest thing to do if you ask me.. freaking having more cooling in your system is like adding stuff to a cars engine to let it BREATH!!! And well the ppl. who dont overclock will love the price... Intel has this all figured out I tell you and this is going to be just like the 300A's!!
Just for your INFO: They are keeping the clock at 66Mhz (default)... now as the article mentions this is usefull cause you can overclock by simply changing the FSB to 100!!!
The 566 has a 8.5X multiplier and a 66MHz bus speed (8.5 x 66MHz = 566MHz). We used an Abit BE6-II for our overclocking tests, and after dabbing on a little thermal paste and slapping on a fat fan, we started overclocking our first processor. The FSB speeds flew by as we went higher and higher. The CPU was still stable when we hit the magic 100MHz FSB for a 850MHz clock speed.
Non-Deterministic Finite Automata
I'd disagree there - read this post by OOG and then this one. The idea AFAIK is a sort of troll on form rather than content - posting clever stuff in a stupid way and seeing how it gets moderated. After all it should be what the poster says and not how they say it that counts.
Because, my dear friend, that would make it a Pentium III Xeon, and Intel wants to keep selling those too, with their exorbidantly high price tags. Admittedly, the fastest Xeon out thus far is 550mhz, and there are Xeons with 2mb of L2 cache, but I'm sure this is the reason. It would create a conflict in their product line.
It would be cool to get some sort of tool that could re-enable the cache on the chip.. by a Cel, get a P3.. -Foxxz
Yes, for DSP or anything that requires lots of cacheing, a Celeron-2 would be less than ideal, esp. since its L2 cache latency is set to 2 (to further induce people to go for the more expensive and less latent P!!! CuMine). However, for number-crunching these are ideal cheap processors to put into render farms, Beowulf (I hate to say that word now, the trolls seem to want to screw Beowulf clusters more than they want to screw Natalie Portman) clusters, or anything where most or all of the important code can fit into the L1 and the rest can at least fit into the L2. If your app can fit in the L1, then there's no performance increase at all between the cheap Celery-2 and the unholy expensive CuMine P!!!. If your app can't fit in the L1 but can fit in the L2--most number-crunching stuff can--then the only difference between the processors will be the slightly delayed L2 latency which won't hurt performance on such an app by much.
;-) Nah, because the Spitfire Athlon that's coming up will be cheaper than a similarly-clocked Celeron-2, and probably outperform it by a respectable margin.
;-)
I ought to buy a cheap Celery-2 just to get my numbers on Distributed.net up to a respectable level.
But anyway, it all depends on what your applications for the processor are going to be, as to whether it'll really be worth the extra money. When a really good SMP Celeron-2 motherboard comes out, that and 2 cheap Celeron-2s will probably be cheaper and as effective in Linux or Win2k than a Coppermine P!!! at a speed grade or 2 above the 2 Celerons. In other words, the Celeron 2 still has its place even among the technocracy.
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."--Tacitus, *The Annals*
The SMP-ability of a Coppermine processor is determined by the stepping of the processor--i.e., the earliest CuMines couldn't SMP, at least not officially. I don't know whether the capability was still there, but just not certified yet, or not there at all. Anyone know?
:-)
So, if the stepping of a CuMine--whether Celeron or full-cached--is 1, then it isn't certified for SMP. If the stepping of a full-cache Coppermine P!!! is at least 2, and prefereably 3, then it's fully SMP capable, definitely. While the Celerons are not certified for SMP work at all, and never were, they use the same core and therefore are SMP capable with the same caveats about the processor stepping. In fact, Celerons are probably just Coppermine P!!! with half the cache rendered unusable; this makes sense from an economic standpoint, because as AMD learned with their ghastly K6-III yields, much of the on-die cache can be ruined when the processor is being made; AMD had to disable all the on-die cache on such processors and sell them as cheap K6-2s, and when Intel gets a dud Coppermine it can still be sold as a Celeron as long as half of the on-die cache is still salvageable.
So, to make a long story short, yeah, the new Celeron-2s can do SMP as long as they're not stepping 1, and preferably at least stepping 3. The trick is finding a motherboard that can handle 2 SMP Celery-deuces; I think MSI is coming out with one soon, based on a VIA chipset.
Personally, I'm holding off my upgrade path (a lot--I'm still on a high K6-2 machine) until I can get an SMP Athlon Thunderbird setup, toward the end of the year. I do, however, plan to buy it one processor at a time--I ain't made of money. Personally, I'm happier with AMD chips just because I'm pissed that ChipZilla has been using the same processor core for so many year now it's pathetic. If not for AMD, we wouldn't have either Coppermine P!!! or Celery-2 processors yet--look at Intel's old roadmaps. It's obvious that they never have cared for advancing microprocessors for the desktop user. But, I digress...
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."--Tacitus, *The Annals*
just to correct you, the so called "Athalons", don't currently run in a dual configuration, and we'll be lucky if we see a dual Athlon board by years end. (which was going to be my next system, but now it might be dual p3s)
I've noticed as of late Intel's processors have had less L2 cache, but running at twice the speed.
Could anyone out there tell me why they just can't put more cache on and make it run at full clock speed? Is there a technical reason, or is Intel just being stingy?
Why not Pentium III's with 512k L2 cache running at full clock speed?
You can get your hands on a Celeron II? Really?? That's strange, I don't see it for sale by any reputable retailers right now. Or did you mean that reviewers can get their hands on them and perform totally lame sets of benchmarks on the processors? The Spitfire's so close to being out that it's very well worth speculating about. In fact, there really isn't much to speculate about. We all know it's going to have on-die cache. That's really the only difference between it and the current Athlons. So what's there to speculate?
Okay, you can overclock it, but what I want to know is, does it make the Internet faster, like the PIII? I'm not going to buy a new computer based on "benchmarks" unless they are backed up by a solid advertising campaign.
I'm going to live forever or die trying.
FriendTech Socket370 to FCPGA converter
This card allows you to put Coppermine processors on normal Socket 370 boards, which normally don't support FCPGA processors. For more info on overclocking and these cards (in the future), I suggest HardOCP and Overclockers.
WHY only gaming benchmarks? Why don't these sites put kernel compiling benchmarks or MP3 encoding benchmarks or software mpeg-2 benchmarks or effective SpecINT's/SpecFP's. The less I play games, the less useful I find these kinds of benchmarks.
I concur. The current best bang for the buck option I have seen is plugging a P3/550E FCPGA 100FSB(~$180) into a motherboard that supports true 133FSB and FCPGA. You get a rock solid ~732MHz CPU and full functioning 256k L2 cache. Until someone figures out how to enable the full 256k on the Celeron-2, this seems to be a much better option.
Do any of you really think that Intel is going to make the same misstake again? Never will there be a low-end processor outperforming a high-end one again. And besides, everyone keeps comparing overclocked celerons with un-overclocked P!!!'s ... Didn't you stop to think that the P!!!'s are highly clockkable aswell? (Not to even mention the Athlons that arn't even multiplier-locked) Alas, FSB speed has a dramatic impact on perfomance as a whole ... In my last upgrade i made a severe misstake and bought a C466 PPGA only to discover that due to the 66mhz FSB my old C300@450 was faster ... Luckily the local shop allowed me to change my mind and thus I now have a P3/450 rock solid at 560mhz with a 124mhz FSB ... It came out with three times more performance than then both of the old celerons ... and this with only 1/4-1/5 higher cpu clock ... No use having a hotly clocked cpu on a slow bus, it'll just be throwing idle cycles waiting for the rest of the machine ... AMD will be my next step, atleast they give you the freedom to push the product as far as you want to , not like intel who keeps trying to control us with their stinking multiplier locks ...
I wonder how this stacks up to AMD's value priced offering, the Spitifire?
There are register rumors (thereby lending credence to the word "rumor") that the spitfires are actually faster than the Athlons. The register claims that they are holding back the spitfire until they can release their new athlon with on-die l2 cache. I don't know if that's true or not, but the Spitfire definitely looks like a serious contender for the Celeron II.
-------- "All I want in life's a little bit of love to take the pain away" --Spiritualized
Hardocp has been talking about overclocking a couple of Celeron II 633s to 1 ghz stable with only an alpha cooler. They should have the benchmarks within the next few days, so we'll see how they perform.
"Control the media, control the mind."-Cabal
This brings about another question: will Intel continue to dominate because of its name, or will AMD gain market share because of the probable superior performance of its Athlon series? I guess the answer depends on who gets more OEM support. AMD has won over several big name companies like IBM, but Intel's domination was shown when Dell decided to stick with Intel and froget about AMD despite Intel's production problems. It shows who has power when a company decides to lose money (Dell) rather than anger Intel.
"Control the media, control the mind."-Cabal
Besides, I used to have an overclocked Celeron and it made the system incredibly unstable. Personally, I think increased stability improves performance much more than a few unstable extra MHz-es worth of processor speed.
News and bla for computer musicians: http://lomechanik.net/
I'm having trouble seeing how this qualifies as 'news', as these chipshave been announced, and tested, for weeks now. This is at _least_ the fourth such article on the web, and not exactly one of the most technically well done. Read here for a much better job imho.
/. Geez, maybe I oughta start submitting the local bowling league results.....
Even if we are to ignore the issue of this post being 'newsworthy', The reviews' implication that a P3 650 performs on par with the ~900Mhz Celermine is laughable. The reviewers decided (for whatever reason) to limit the 3d benchmarks with an old (many would say obsolete) video card. The bottleneck is clearly not the CPU at this point, an assertion backed by many of the other reviews of these chips. There is just no technical reason to support the odd results they got, nor were any attempts made to explain them.
Come on people, let's at least try to analyze what we read on the web before we submit it to
Think outside the... Hey, where'd the friggin' box go?
while the new celerons are nice chips, they definitely fall far behind the coppermines at comperable speeds, for a detailed celeron vs coppermine article check this one at hardocp
Don't be mean or my friend Oog will smash your head
Well this puts BP6 owners in an interesting position. Windows 2000 just recently made SMP workable, but driver support is still somewhat iffy. I currently have a BP6 myself but I never bothered with SMP because the Nvidia drivers still seem a bit buggy in Win2000. And SMP is really only useful for compiling various things and games. But even Q3 performance only seems to jump 10-20% with SMP, plus take off 5% for immature Win 2000 video drivers. Now we have the Celeron 2. Hmmm. Well SMP seems to be broken even with one of those nifty Powerleap adapters. But how would a single C2-566 compare to a single C1-550? Or how does dual C1-550's compare to a single C2 running a 866-900mhz? Is it worth the upgrade? How consistently are these C2's going to overclock to a 100mhz (+/-) bus? A ~866 mhz Celeron 2 looks really temping to me right now. And it's not THAT expensive (looks like under $200) I wouldn't have to bother with Win2000's immature video drivers, a single processor helps ALL applications, and SSE can't hurt either.
-Vic If you can't figure out my email, then don't.
The whole Celeron range of CPUs seems to be deliberately crippled, unless you think Intel actually wants you to overclock them.
Intels website is at www.intel.com and more information on hardware can be found at tomshardware.com
thank you
dmg
Too bad that using liquid N2 isn't something we all can do. At least not until someone comes up with a "do it yourself freeze-your-fingers-off" kit. Wich means that it is (for now) just one of those interesting facts that are cool to know about, but that doesn't have any practical use (yet, and probably not for years). Sure, we have a little robot running around on Mars, but has it changed your life yet?
Chris...
---
This message has been ROT-13 encrypted twice for higher security.
It would take dual Celeron 1GHz's to out perform a single PIII/Athlon.
Remember, Celeron 900Mhz = 650Mhz PIII Cu. (approx) Dual CPU != 2X performance. For single process apps, an PIII/Athlon 850 will destroy a Celeron o/c'ed @ 900Mhz. In a configuration where you could actually use the 2nd CPU, it may acutally tie.
Based on my benchmark (3D Games) Athlon is the way to go for ppl who want performance, and a great price.
Why do I keep typing pythong?