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New Dual-Celeron PC's Encourage Overclocking
Steve Nakhla writes "The same people responsible for the iMac-looking PC's are now shipping a dual-Celeron PC, that makes overclocking a breeze. " So the question is, Publicity
Stunt, or a valuable feature that consumers want? A motherboard that
makes 8x overclocking easy is certainly cool, but its definitely gonna void some warranties, and maybe even blow up some chips.
These types of announcements are a sure fire way to push Intel to add restrictions to the Celeron processors. I fully expect we'll see this when Coppermine comes out, the packaging will change and the chip will no longer support any overclocking or Dual mode.
What exactly do you mean by "the tolerances are a lot tighter in an SMP setup"? The limits on overclocking shouldn't be much different in an SMP system aside from the higher ambient temp in the box due to the extra CPU. The chipset should isolate any timing errors on one CPU from the other.
NT won't work with a WinAnything.
More FUD from the Linux crowd. The only one who's been talking about removing SMP from Celerons is Intel.
Face it the "Linux never crashs" is a myth/urban legend. And I'm sure since this isn't a "bash Microsoft, Torvalds is god, Linux rules" post it will be moderated down or marked as a troll.
I stopped purchasing and reccammending the bp6 boards simply becuase I could not rely on them to
reboot properly. Installed 98, NT4, DreadHat-6, none of them would reboot without haveing to
powercycle the machine. Needless to say this is
not usefull as a reliable machine.
I'm using an overclocked dual celeron machine right now... This article was VERY VERY misleading about a lot of things related to overclocking these beasts...let's begin:
:)
* You can't change the multiplier for the celerons with any celeron except for the 300a. After the 300a, intel installed a multiplier "lock" on their celerons after that. The 366, 466, etc., all have a locked multiplier that you must use to make the machine boot. I have a celeron 366, and I use the 5.5 multiplier that the chips specifies.
* To overclock the celerons, rather than upping the multiplier, you increase the bus speed of the board. Celerons default to 66MHz bus. If you increase that in small increments, you can get higher speeds. I managed to get my bus speed to 95MHz, so I'm running my dual 366's at 523MHz. It's hot, and requires a BIG case, with a LOT of fans. (8 in this computer)
*Disadvatage: When you change bus speed to anything other than 66MHz or 100MHz on this motherboard (abit bp6), you are overclocking or underclocking your AGP bus, and your PCI bus. This does WEIRD things to hardware, sometimes. If the hardware doesn't have a high tolerance for this sort of thing, you can have problems, like frequently losing data on the hard drive.
I was pretty lucky with my setup. I ordered two celeron 366's "guaranteed" to reach 550MHz. This would be ideal, because I'd be running the 5.5 multiplier at the 100MHz bus speed. The AGP and PCI buses would be running at their standard speeds. Unfortunately, I cannot get the machine to stay stable at 550MHz. To make it reach that speed, I have to change the voltage on the chip from 2.05 volts for 523MHz, to 2.3 volts for 550... If I don't change the voltage, the machine refuses to boot any os before getting an error. If I change the voltage, the computer is only marginally more stable, and quickly overheats and locks up, despite my cooling.
To make a long story short, BE CAREFUL with this offer. The 366->550 is about as far as you can really take the celeron chips. The chance of doing that successfully is 1/4 per chip, I think. The 466 isn't going to overclock to the full 100MHz bus speed, because the celeron fabrication process maxes around 600MHz. Maybe you can squeeze 620 or so out, but you're really pushing it. If you really want to be guaranteed a good overclocking experience, get yourself some 300a celeron chips. They go to 450Mhz (100MHz bus) 80% of the time... But they are rare, and are as expensive as the 366 multiplier-locked chips, sometimes.
Don't buy one of these pre-built machines and expect to run 8x anything... The author was very confused. Go to http://www.arstechnica.com/ and read about overclocking a little, and you'll be a lot safer in the end.
Also, don't ignore the advantage to running these machines without overclocking... Dual processor is nice. Celeron 533's are going to max out the celeron line, before they hit a new chip-fab...so... If you wait a little while, maybe 3 months or so, you can pick up some 500 or 533 MHz celeron chips, pop them in one of these boards, and maybe do some slight overclocking to squeeze another 50MHz out of it... and you've got yourself a great dual processor board that will outperform comparable pentium II's, due to the higher cache speed.
-Larry
sorry about the length of the rant.
...These aren't the droids you're looking for....Move along....
Dual 504 celerons have even beat dual 560 PENITUM IIIs on MANY tests in the ars monster box beatdown, and evened out in so many more. What a moron, celerons haven't been without L2 since the 266 and 300 versions, the 300A was the GOD of overclocking and smoked PII450s from the start!
...256k of FULL SPEED L2 CACHE, which will rock the fucking shit out of 512k half speed. That and sdram speeds increasing, which will reduce the penalty from cache misses. NEWS FLASH: 512k at 1/2 is NOT better than 128k of 1x speed for many many things, and guess what, for the MAJORITY of things the 128k full speed is BETTER. Heh. I feel sorry fr anyone who bought a PII after the 300A arrived. The PIII at least has the nice excuse of SIMD and 'official' clock speeds, but soon that will go away as well. Cumine and Cascades will be the only intel choices left in the future. AMD can blow me with its faked scores on some benchmarks (cough 3dmark) and its new policy of 'hardware case-remove overclock only' that only sold out assholes like Tomshardware and petanerds from Japan [all due respect on the last one, they gave us CelerySMP :] get to do.
Can you say 'rip off the case and hardware-solder-modify pain in the ass easy to screw up' overclocking only? FSB is locked on the motherboards as dictated by AMD (which is why Abit laughed when they were asked if they would be making a 1st gen Athlon Board;) and no multiplier to play with.
PS, Celerons based on the CuMine core (their formal name is Timna) will be introduced Q2/00.
- Abit BP6
and the- Celeron 366
s has me quite impressed so far...Same here... 24/7 with my dual celeron 300a @ 450. The company I bought the CPU's from gave me a 3 year warranty covering overclocking and tested to run at 450 before delivery. I think just about anyone could agree to that.
Today's English Lesson: Oxymorons
Sanity.html - Error 404 not found
Yep. My PC will always be a little pipsqueak compared to those billion kajillion dollar super-raging-stonker computers. For my purposes, an overclocked Celeron has a stupendous price/performance ratio. If YOU can afford those machines, bully for you! Leave the rest of us peons alone.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Why would this be any harder on your PCI cards then just running them in a PII or PIII system that already had a 100Mhz frontside bus speed?
>Too bad Quake doesn't utilize SMP.
Really? So why is Quake2 v3.19 faster on NT4 than 95 when software rendering on a dual CPU motherboard?
Both these figures are on an Abit BP6 with dual Celery 400's (not OC'd)
demo1
'95 400x300: 32.2fps, 800x600: 13.2fps
NT4 400x300: 37.3fps, 800x600: 16.2fps
crusher
'95 640x480: 13.1fps
NT4 640x480: 15.0fps
Note that when using OpenGL mode, NT is about as much slower than 95 as it is faster with software (partly due to the lousy NT drivers most cards have - OK for 2d, suck for 3d).
The cache isn't the difference.
Compiling the kernel is a single processor operation. gcc isn't SMP capable. Therefore, you are comparing a single Celeron @ 433 with a K6-3 @ 400. Both processors have a small full speed L2 cache (256k for the K6-3 and 128k for the Celeron). Since both caches are direct mapped (not set-associative), the difference between 128k and 256k is very small. However, the K6-3 is architecturally more efficient at integer ops, so the K6 is better for kernel compiles.
That is what I was going to say if nobody else came along and already had.
Intel is going to really take notice if there are businesses selling Intel products in a manner that they are not supposed to be sold.
Shame on Future Power for doing this, and for selling an iMac clone. They need to get a new business strategy.
There is a petition for Intel to not take SMP support out of the next Celeron (based on the PIII). http://www.cpureview.com/smp_petition.html
EverCode
I just have to say this: "-j 2" actually make 1 job, you need to run the compile with "-j 4" to speed it up on a dual-cpu.
i want one! now with duel smp's i'll kill anyone in quake!
So does this mean the store won't try to sell me a warrantee too? Somehow I doubt it.
A dual Celery box is tantamount to OC'ing anyway. (It voids your warranty, and Intel Internet Support won't have anything to do with 'em. :) )
So, OCing and dualing Celeries go hand in hand... _but_ the tolerances are a lot tighter in an SMP setup.
The 8X maximum multiplier in the article refers to the processor speed relative to the bus speed, not relative to the "official speed". Current Celerons use a 66mHz bus, so 8x would mean a maximum speed of 533mHz. These machines will default to 7x for a 466 mHz clock.
don't mind the smell of fresh semiconductor gone wrong. Some of you are recalling the smell as I write this now. This actually harkens back to the olden days of building your own tube radios to get the performance you knew you could have if you were persistant enough. Same thing.
Sure, semis don't spark as much, but that saves you the inconvenience of having to hide behind the couch when you switch things on. Even today if you were to put an electrolytic cap in wrong, that would pop like a firecracker.
Think of it as baptism by fire. Not for everyone, just those who want to push the envelope.
It doesn't matter that it has an 8X multiplier, the Celeron is multiplier locked. But there are good bus speed choices on the BP6.
I'm using one of those abit boards now, with dual celery 433s. Runs ok. The lack of cache hurts it (and all celerons) to where even with "-j 2" it takes longer to build a kernel then my k6-3/400.
Ahh the smoke theory. For those of you not familiar with it, some electronics techs (I picked it up in the air force) believe in a smoke theory. It states that all electronics run on smoke. If you do something wrong, the smoke escapes, causing an odd smell. Once the smoke escapes, the components don't have anything to run on.
>I trust a board when it's "compiler stable" I use gcc for my tests.
I am running a BP6 at home, dual Celery 400's, not overclocked. Kernel compile time for kernel 2.2.11 (running 2.2.11 SMP) is:
elapsed: 169.379 user: 276.080, system: 26.96
FWIW: I was running X, but no mp3's. I doubt that playing mp3's would have done anything except extend the elapsed time for the compile.
I've been running NT, '95, and linux with no stability problems on any OS (and I admit that's unusual for '95). YMMV. What were Anandtech doing to destabilise their setup? Overclocking perhaps?
If you noticed, there was a quick poll question as to whether or not people should be allowed to overclock their own computers. The results are undoubtedly weighed heavily toward "Yes" because of all the /. traffic.
I looked at the results myself just now, and it was 96% "Yes". Not surprising, although it is surprising that there are 4% who said "No". Apparently these people feel that you should not be able to do things with your own property that are undoubtedly legal and safe (well not for the processor, but has anyone died in a house fire that was started by a P200MMX clocked at 1466 Mhz?) as well as possibly beneficial, just because it voids the warranty and possibly shortens the processor's life about 5 years. Not that anyone with the brains to overclock would be caught dead using 400mhz Celerons in 6 months, overclocked or not. At the time I looked, there were 130+ who voted "No". Those are probably people who were lucky to find the power switch, there's probably 300 more people who are still looking... (scary)
you let the magic smoke out...:(
But when I went to 'Log In' to say so non-ACly, the server shuffled me via perl script to the old format (with ads), except now it's http://slashdot.org instead of http://slashdot.com So I came back here. I just figure ad-less for free is too good to last, so enjoy it while we can ! ...Oh yeah...Celeries... No thanks
Not only would this be better appeal to hackers in the near term, but the more people that void the warranty, and thus fry their processors/motherboard, the more products they're likely to sell.
Very strange business model, if they actually cooked it up.
Lucas eletronics [found in british sports cars] operate on the same prinicipal, with the same [persistant] results. Lucas pc's anybody?
The PII and PIII place the 512k L2 cache on two separate 256k modules and a tag RAM chip, outside of the CPU die but on the same PCB board. The Celerons have the 128k L2 cache on the same die as the CPU. Therefore, the Celeron die is LARGER than the PII or PIII CPU die. Similarly, the PII and PIII CPUs (just the CPU modules, not including the cache) have a higher yield than the Celerons.
The Celerons are easier to overclock than the PII and PIII because they don't have the external cache modules holding them back, which are the limiting factor in overclocking the PII and PIII. If you disable the L2 cache, you can usually get a PII or PIII to clock faster than a comparable Celeron.
Finally, nobody outside of Intel really knows whether the Celeron is much cheaper to produce than the PII or PIII. The larger die size of the Celeron may make it more expensive, but the lack of external cache modules (which are cheap) and lack of a plastic case may offset the difference. My belief is that the production cost of the entire Intel CPU line is relatively constant, and also very small compared to their wholesale prices. Their pricing structure is artificial and largely market driven, not based on their production cost.
The performance decrease suffered from going from a 512k to 128k L2 cache is more or less offset by making the Celeron cache full speed vs. 1/2 speed for the PII & PIII. At equal clock speeds, the Celerons actually perform slightly better in games and other FP intensive applications while the PII and PIII perform slightly better in multi-tasking loads. Overall, the performance differences are very small (less than 1% in either direction) in most cases.
Time to go to sleep I guess.
Yeah but look it bring a system to the table. And another thing, the system is really cheap and comes well packaged. It also runs linux out of the box, if it is RH though I will look the other way :-), what we need are some slackware running PCs ;-).
So far I've overclocked 466s and 366s. There is a correlation between batch numbers and overclockability. Unfortunately when you overclock, you reduce the environmental tolerance of the chip. You can't run it outside in 90o weather anymore. You can't use it on the road when you're unsure of the room temperature.
Also when you get pretested chips, the tests they use aren't very comprehensive. The same chips which run Prime95 forever crash easily with Broadcast 2000. Also one reason they're selling CPUs matched to the dual motherboard is that the two sockets are electrically different. Some CPUs are only stable when inserted in one order. Instead of getting those CPUs back as defective they're matching them to the socket they work in, but if you accidentally change sockets without knowing this, you're out of luck.
I got the BP6 running dual celeron 366s with heat sink/fan combos temporarily scavenged from 3d cards.
With these substandard fans, I have an effective cpu speed of 1048mhz (2x 524). By mistake I left the system on today, not expecting it to be stable when I got home;
it was still running seti. (not that that's a great test, but I'll see how stable it stays).
So why pay twice/3x as much to get a pentium III 600?
Why spend 4x the $$$ for 10% extra speed? The 366mhz celerons cost the same as P500s anyway to manufacture. Most of todays lowend cpus are artificial LOWEND. If they were honest, the lowend would be truly 500mhz min, and the lowermhz ratings chips would be only the unsold ones. Why make slow speed cpus when they will work at high speed? Its called protecting your highend cpu margins. www.bxboards.com www.overclockers.com www.hothardware.com
I haven't touched the BP6. However, I've built many systems with other Abit motherboards and their stability is generally excellent. I've had especially good luck with BH6 boards. They are poplular among overclockers precisely because of their stability. Tyan motherboards are generally the worst I've seen. Not so much because they are unstable but because so many Tyan boards have BOIS bugs and problems with various PCI cards. I'll agree that long, hard compilations are good tests of stability. However, don't forget that since Linux makes CPU idle calls (like NT) but 95/98 doesn't, CPUs run cooler in Linux. So heat related stability issues will be less common in Linux. Personally, I've found (like others) that running Unreal under Win95 tends to be the ultimate test of stability. Also, I've seen more sig 11s while compiling on non-overclocked K6 boxes than overclocked Celerons.
Unfortunately, most of the desirable vintage motorcycles also rely on Lucas electrics, which limits you to carrying plenty of spare parts (points, coils, brushes, fuses, etc.) or taking real short rides. Thankfully, the Japanese eventually proved there were better methods of engineering. It's hard to believe that despite the shit-ass quality of Lucas, no other vendor rose to challenge them in the 50s and 60s.
I have been running a BP6 w/dual 400mhz Celerons for about 4 weeks now. No overclocking here (I have tested the CPU's running at a high FSB) but not for any length.
:)
The machine has been running fine, no problems that I can see.
I have compiled the kernel several times, along w/Wine, etc etc... No problems, and it is fast
Every hardware story has to have a post like this. If you know anything about the x86 processor industry, this is obviously a troll. If not, please do some research into x86 CPU design, fab, yields, market pricing strategy, etc.
I run Abit BH6 (not BP6) motherboards in most of my Linux servers at work and have found that they one of the most stable motherboards I have ever used.
What it basically boils down to is a company starting to use Abit's BP6.
Something avid overclockers have known for some time now..
This would be decent for those that can't assemble their own computers and find cheap SMP interesting.
Though the whole part about overclocking is ridiculous and just fluff for that article. First of all, overclocking isn't exactly as simple as setting it to a higher speed and watching it fly. You can't just overclock a chip on a whim. Intel processors have multiplier locks. If they overclock, they can only go up to certain speeds. You have to take in account voltage tweaks, instability, and the added heat that comes with overclocking.
And last I checked, I haven't seen any company put Alpha heatsinks in their computers.
Not only that, but you can overclock with other motherboards, so it isn't exactly so special.
Most hardware sites will give you more relevant information on the BP6 than this article...
AnandTech, HardOCP, etc...
r_smp 1 enables SMP in Quake3
Overlocking a pair of 466s? You have to be joking...
The only FSB speed I would consider running anything at is either 66 or 100mhz, and to overclock a 466 celeron up to a 100mhz FSB, it would run at 700mhz. Sounds nice, but is, as far as I know, impossible to attain. Even with 2.3v through the cpu.
The easiest to overclock have always been the 300As, (which I myself have running at 4.5x103), but the 366s became popular for running at 550 with a bit of tweakage.
I have a mate with a Abit BP6, and two 366s running at 550 mhz each, which totals to 1.1GHz, if you use a SMP-enabled OS, such as linux or NT.
However, his case temp is up to 40 degrees celcius, which I regard as ridiculous (as mine runs at 20).
My point is, the higher the clock multipler, the harder they get to overlock. Anything above 366 is very hard to reach 100mhz (FSB), and running the FSB at 75 or 83Mhz is just plain stupid, due to the AGP/PCI overclock, which can (and ofter does) result in destroying your cards.
So buying a dual 466mhz system, with hopes to overclock, will leave you disappointed.
---Transmission Ends.---
Overlocking a pair of 466s? You have to be joking...
The only FSB speed I would consider running anything at is either 66 or 100mhz, and to overclock a 466 celeron up to a 100mhz FSB, it would run at 700mhz. Sounds nice, but is, as far as I know, impossible to attain. Even with 2.3v through the cpu.
The easiest to overclock have always been the 300As, (which I myself have running at 4.5x103), but the 366s became popular for running at 550 with a bit of tweakage.
I have a mate with a Abit BP6, and two 366s running at 550 mhz each, which totals to 1.1GHz, if you use a SMP-enabled OS, such as linux or NT.
However, his case temp is up to 40 degrees celcius, which I regard as ridiculous (as mine runs at 20).
My point is, the higher the clock multipler, the harder they get to overlock. Anything above 366 is very hard to reach 100mhz (FSB), and running the FSB at 75 or 83Mhz is just plain stupid, due to the AGP/PCI overclock, which can (and ofter does) result in destroying your cards.
So buying a dual 466mhz system, with hopes to overclock, will leave you disappointed.
---Transmission Ends.---
Sorry about the repeat post!
isn't the overclocking itself, but the chips that you would be overclocking are the Celeron 500s. They have an 8x multiplier locked into them. If Joe Shmoe sets the bus speed to 100mhz he now has an 800mhz system which melts without one hell of a cooling system. Of course he could overclock it to a 75 or 83 mhz bus speed which would give him either a 600 or 664mhz system which would melt without some nice sized fans, but then the PCI bus acts like an abused monkey. Intel doesn't want the bad publicity of their chips melting. They also don't want hardware and software companies breathing down their back because people are complaining about their products not working with these overclocked systems. Joe Overclocker wouldnt complain, he knows what he's doing but Joe Shmoe who thinks it's cool to change numbers in the BIOS or play with jumper settings will complain.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
The two things that matter when you overclock is the speed of the system bus and the clock multiplier. In the Celeron the multiplier is locked but you can increase the system bus for example 66->100 MHz so what you actualy do is overbusing. The thing with the Abit BP6 is that is has alot of bus settings, it has 1 MHz steps between 75 and 100 Mhz and that is why it is so good for overclockers.
This isn't anything to get excited about. If you bothered to read the article, you would know that this is just computer built around the Abit BP6 dual socket-370 motherboard. Whoopee. That and a bunch of marketing press/hype for the less-informed.
Really, Windows is much more finicky over CPU temps/overclocking/etc. You should know this. *NIX works great on my BP6/dual-Celerons. Stable as hell. Anand is on crack.
SMP suport in NT is better than Linux, at least.
Not as good as Solaris, IRIX, or Digital UNIX, but not bad considering it's a Microsoft product.
umm, in an SMP setup you don't add up the speed of your CPUs and say thats the speed of your system.
Thats cause the airforce is a bunch idiots. It's called a smoke check, if it smokes, its bad. (I picked it up in the navy).
Quick primer:
Now, for the explanation. For heavy processing of repetitive data (searching a database, for example) a bigger L2 cache is better, so from worst to best is: Celeron, CuMine, P2/P3, Xeon. Yes, that means that for repetitive data, a Coppermine P3 is worse than a Katmai (current) P3. For non-repetitive data (games, office apps, distributed.net...) a faster cache is better, regardless of size. So, for THAT, worst to best is: P2/P3, Celeron, Xeon, CuMine (Xeon and Celeron's positions are debatable. Because the Celeron's cache is on-die, it is marginally faster than the Xeon's. If all data is truly non-repeating, a Celeron will beat a Xeon. Proof below.)
Now for the benchmarks. Distributed.net is a great example of non-repetitive data. Because it is very CPU-intensive, and key searching never sees the same data twice, it is a good example for non-repetitive benchmarking.
All tests run in Windows NT Server 4.0, Service Pack 5, 128MB RAM, U2SCSI drive, with distributed.net as the only user process running, with all services killed, and explorer.exe killed. The Pentium II and Pentium ||| tests were run on an Intel L440GX+ board, The CuMine test was run on a beta L440GX+; the Xeon tests were run on an Intel C440GX+ board (essentially the same board), and the Celeron tests were run on an Intel CA810 with an Adaptec 2930U2. The tests were run by using the same buff-in.rc5 file, and running the "Long RC5 benchmark".
So, what do you think?
As for the CuMine in socket form? Well, it will be PGA370 starting in December.
Anyway, Anandtech's review of the BP6 (yes, I actually read it before I bought my BP6) is the only negative review I've read about the board. They are somewhat vague concerning the instability of the BP6, and don't really provide any details (or perhaps I didn't read it correctly).
From my personal experience, I've had zero ramdumps in NT with the BP6 (except with Winamp which is due to the SMP code in the CLabs SBLive! drivers), while ramdumps were common when doing a lot of multitasking on my Asus P5A w/ K6-2 400 and 128M of RAM (under NT 4.0 w/ SP5). http://www.ocabj.net/pcs/aurora.html. It's got a few tidbits to keep it half interesting.
The dual Celeron 500's in my BP6 work just fine. It's nice to run a cumulative total of 1GHz. :-)
These socket-370 Celerons are multiplier-locked. I never overclock anything though --- I just don't have time for worrying about instability.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
I've been running a Celeron 300A @ 450MHz since the first 300A hit the market (about a year ago). In it's overclocked state it's actually more stable than my non-overclocked K6-200. I expect to keep it for another year or two.
This is just great. With rumors about Intel thinking about disabling all SMP capabilities in Celerons floating around, it's hard enough to believe anything. Now we actually have a PC manufacturer offering dual Celeries *and* promoting them as "mid-range, small-business servers" -- the coffin has been sealed now. Kiss any decent future Celerons good-bye. That's okay, I guess. If we're going to be forced to use high-dollar CPUs, at least there's the Athlon. I have no problem at all with big corporations like Intel -- it's just when they're so nastily greedy and protective of their quasi-empire, they overlook the customers they are gaining. I used to be an AMD fan until the 300A came out. I got 450mhz at roughly the same time as the P2-450 came out. I was very happy. Now I have dual Celeron 366s at 550mhz each. I'm appreciative and as long as Intel keeps pushing out a new, king-of-overclocking CPU each year around mid-summer I'll continue to buy their products. But if they're going to play these useless games and jerk everyone off for two summers then think they're gaining brand loyalty, they have another thing coming. I have zero problems dumping Intel and going back to AMD (or anybody else with a killer CPU). If Intel alienates all their satisfied hobbyist customers, then they're screwing themselves. I really suggest we tell Future Power how pleased they are for bringing dual Celerons into the lime light and fucking everyone.
If those commercial boxes are up-market, what does that make my latest machine: Abit BP6 m/b, dual Celeron 500, 256M memory, dual 80MHz Ultra2 SCSI controllers, dual 100Tx Ethernet, 6 x 9.1 Gb LVD/Ultra2 drives split across the two SCSI buses, 19" rack chassis with dual redundant power supply.
:-)
I'm in heaven.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
No, you don't understand! The Pentium III (r) makes the Internet come alive! It gives you dancing Intel bunnymen and strange viking-type people to enrich your Web experience! If you're not using a Pentium III (r) processor to browse the Web, you're missing out!
http://www.intel. com/home/pentiumiii/surf.htm?iid={showroom=body}-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Nah, make -j2 is fastest for me :
make --version
GNU Make version 3.76.1
http://rareformnewmedia.com/
Here's a cool review/comparison I found on Ars-Technica.
There's a lot of benchmark comparison stuff, so if you want to skip to the final analysis....
I just got my BP6 and 2 Celeron 466's in the mail yesterday...maybe I'll call in sick today.
Uh...what?
Yeah, like my Celeron 300A running at 450 MHz that's been running 24/7 running seti@home for almost a year now. I had an uptime of 50 days before I last changed kernel.
%japh = (
'name' => 'Niklas Nordebo', 'mail' => 'niklas@nordebo.com',
'work' => 'www.pipe-dd.com', 'phone' => '+46-708-444705'
The BP6 is Socket 370 only, so it depends on Intel's move in random socketing at that time.
%japh = (
'name' => 'Niklas Nordebo', 'mail' => 'niklas@nordebo.com',
'work' => 'www.pipe-dd.com', 'phone' => '+46-708-444705'
Stupid intel SMP! The cpus share a single electrical bus.
All you need is a good heat sink/fan combo. I have a dual celeron 366 running at 550 MHz 24/7 and I have yet to have any problems. My motherboard (ABIT) has TCs to monitor the temp of the CPUs and they claims my CPUs are under 100 degrees F each. I'm not too worried about smoking these puppies.
If you are worried about smoking your chips, you can always buy your Celerons from a place like computernerd.com who will give you a year guarentee they won't smoke.
BTW. The heatsink/fans I use are awsome. They are the cool-it-dudes! from computernerd.com.
later...
Quack
ps. Did I mention deal celerons rock?
Yes, but all intel chips are multiplier locked now. So the only way to OC them is to play with the FSB speed. Thankfully abit boards make this a breeze. Change the clock multiplier and it no work. As far as I know 7x75MHz is quite achievable with 7x83MHz being much more difficult without kickass cooling. And 7x100MHz no chance. Me I run a P3 450 at either 112MHz or 120MHz depending on how adventurous I'm feeling. BTW I loe the voids your warranty argument. How can they tell what clock speed you've been running your cpu at? It reduces the lifespan but as I upgrade every 6 months at most who cares if it won't last 20 years?
8x, I would suspect, is the maximum multiplier "officially" supported by the motherboard. Since Celerons all are multiplier locked, you can't increase the multiplier - the system will refuse to boot. HOWEVER...
You CAN increase the FSB speed. Heh.
Normally, your Celeron 433 will run at 66.6_x6.5, or 433.3_ MHz. Now, just up that FSB to 100mhz, and you've got a machine running at 650mhz. PROBLEM! You probably also just melted your motherboard!
Don't worry though - just jump down to 75MHz (487MHz) or 83.5 MHz (542.75MHz) front side bus speeds. Much more friendly on your CPU, but a bitch on your PCI cards, and let's not even talk about AGP. ^_^"
InThane
I mean, I know the Xeons have more cache, but with Celerons approaching 600 MHz, why doesn't Intel concentrate on the Celeron for consumers and leave the overpriced PIII to the highend / server market? What kind of advantage is Joe User going to see with a 600 MHz PIII that he won't with a 500 MHz Celeron?
What makes the PIII "better" than the celeron, anyway? All those useful extra instructions?
I have so many questions today!
rooooar
And here I was, all excited to crank my celeron 400 up to 3200 Mhz.... heh
is overclocking. I got a celeron 466 and I'm running it at 525 by raising the front side bus speed up to 75 in the softmenu bios of my abit motherboard. I love celerons and overclocking :)
-Dyl6
Stability. I dont trust Abit-brand motherboards. Anandtech branded the BP6 the "least stable dual motherboard we've ever tested". Face it, Abit boards are "overclockers boards" and the people who I see on Usenet calling them "totally stable" are using Windows, and thus dont know what stable is. The BP6 is surely not the sort of server-grade motherboard that Supermicro and Tyan (well, their Thunder-series) put out. Far below Asus as well. Look at a picture of one of those boards -- nary a tantalum capacitor to be seen. I've got my own test for stability, and it doesnt involve Quake3 or some artificial benchmarks. I trust a board when it's "compiler stable" I use gcc for my tests. When the system can compile the kernel, egcs full bootstrap, the full egcs test-suite, glibc-2.1.X, Wine, and a few choice others w/o barfing...perhaps while in X and w/ rc5 or mp3's playing in the background -- then I consider it stable.
Pentium 3's have 512k lb cahce and the celerons only have 128k. So naturally a pentium 3 600 will perform better than a celeron 600. They had to take som of the cache away from the celerons so that it could be in the "low end" market.
-Dyl6
I'm using the BE6 motherboard and I'm using windows (*gAsP*) and so far I've had no stability problems as long as I have the proper cooling.
-Dyl6
Yawwwnn...
wierd, I thought celerons we're only good for coasters, but maybe not... pretty cool.
either we are networking or we areNT networking
Not the old... The Celeron is the exact same CPU as the Pentium argument again. Hello? They're completely different internally... Same technology yes, but it's not like the Celeron is just the PIII's which failed some tests. Sheesh
Why should you apologize for using win95 for something that Linux is incapable of doing? I think that's pathetic, personally.
You have no clue. I have a 450 with 128 megs of RAM for 300 dollars. All I did was buy Celeron 300 A and some special cas2/2 ram and a cheap motherboard. and I probably payed a thousand dollars less than you did.
Since this is coming from a "Pretty Case" vendor, wouldn't the real overclocker's dream machine be one with racing stripes and a speed control knob on the side that would cause a little engine revving sound to come out of the speaker when it was turned up? Oh, and the obligatory flame decal wrapped around the speed knob, too.
Overclocking is the cultural progeny of the "Turbo" button on old PC cases. I remember how cool I felt when I got my first 8 MHz XT motherboard. Sadly, the feeling of kewlness wore off with time.
Forget their marketing babble. I wouldn't buy their overclocked 466 Celeron boards because they have chosen the wrong CPU. 466 Celerons don't perform as good as 366 when it comes to oc. The only 466++ bonus: these chips run cooler than their slower brothers, 366: about 33W, 466: about 30 W booth at 550 mhz (calculated from INTEL specs. Search for the INTEL 243658-009 datasheet). But what about this 8 fold speed increase they are talking about? Do they mean the 8x multiplier setting of the ABIT BP6? Sorry to say that this doesn't matter, because Celerons have locked multipliers: The 300A is locked at 4,54, the 366 at 5.54 and the 466 at 7.0. So using a 2x multiplier, your 466 will run as fast as using a 8x multiplier. Your Celereon simply ignores your multiplier settings. Your only way to oc the cpu is by increasing the speed of the fsb. INTEL thinks that Celerons should run only using a 66 MHz fsb (perhaps Celerons would be too fast otherwise ? :) Now if you change the speed of the fsb to a healthy 100 MHz, your 466 Celeron would try to run at 706 MHz. To get it to boot (if it posts at all), you'll have to increase its core voltage to about 2.2 - 2.3 volts. But be prepared to have a fire extinguisher at hand after 10 minutes :) So you have to go down with your fsb speed back to about 80 MHz. Now your CPU runs stable without signs of smoke at about 550 MHz. But which CPU will be faster: A 466 Celeron running at 550 MHz with a 80 MHz fsb or a 366 Celeron running at 550 MHz with a 100 MHz fsb? BTW: The main problem when overclocking is heat dissipation. A 366 running at 550 will release about 33 W. Air coolers big enough to remove that amount of heat will be pretty bulky (and don't forget your BX chip with that nice tiny green cooling cap). My BP6 runs perfectly stable at 366@550 (Vcore 2.2 Volts) as long as you let it run cool. At the moment I'm using an additional big room ventilator which blows cool air into the open case. (CPUs about 50 grd C, BX chip 48 grd C). Upgrading to a water cooling system and 2x600 mhz comes into mind. Just yesterday I happend to buy a nice litte silent water pump and some copper:)
--
not sure if anyone else has posted this yet, but arstechnica did some benchmarking, and you can read the article here.
2 celeron 300A's OCed to 504MHz each
vs
2 PIII 500's OCed to 560MHz each
there were a couple of differences in the systems, but the celerons beat the pIII's in almost every test... they're the only numbers i've seen on this issue - interesting at the very least
'Thats they exact same thing a banana wrench monkey.'
It's been my understanding that all celerons since the 300A have had 128K of on-chip L2 cache running the same clock speed as the processor. If the front side bus is running at 66MHz and your HD controller doesn't have a multi-threaded driver, you probably won't see an improvement over your k6-3/400 which has a FSB of 100MHz. If that's the case, not including the "-j 2" and making sure that -pipe is included in CFLAGS might be faster than if you had the "-j 2". I have a dual slot machine, but I need to get a pair of PPGA370 celerons in slockets to test it out.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
What the hell are you talking about? Tube radios??? What are those???????
Yes but only the http://www.slashdot.org not the
http://slashdot.org was kinda curious about that myself...
It's much better this way. Don't start a wave and maybe it'll stay like it is now. Or maybe those green lines will be gone too, replace with something less graphics and faster loading.
I noticed this product ships with Microsoft NT installed.
Since I use exclusively WinModems and Printers, can I "delegate" those processes to one of the CPU's?
I've never played with tubes, but I know that smell you're talking about. There's only one thing in the world that smells like melting semiconductors. Psychologists say that smells are the sense most linked to memories and emotions. The dentist's office has that one smell, Grandma's house has one smell, and melting semiconductors have that smell that always makes you think "Ooooh Shiiiiiiiiit!"
-Barry
Correct. The lack of big cache really hurts. On BP6 with dual 466 oc to 560, I got seti@home: 1 job 12 hours 2 jobs 20 hours so the speedup is at most 16%. I see zillions of cache miss. If I lock the 2 jobs to cpu0 and cpu1 respectively I get approx 19 hours for both jobs to finish.
I wasn't big on overclocking until the 300A celeron came out. I was convinced when I overclocked it to 450mhz with minimal effort ran the same speed as a PII 450mhz in raytracing and rendering tests in lightwave which is my primary application back then. 119$ CDN vs 749$ CDN a few months ago.. its a no brainer to go for the overclocked system. The computer stores knew it too.. including this really horrid places like avalon software whose sales people sold about 15+ retail 300A's a day for overclockers while the admin and repair guys are like overclocking is wrong. =) Heh.
And your comments have pursuaded me not to continue writing that "DebbieDoesDallas" virus I've been working on, and just velcro a P3 to my forehead!
Boy, those girls at the topless bar are really gonna pay attention to me now!
I'm on my way...oh yeah, gotta stop by the ATM...
A Celeron is not the exact same die as a PII. The Celeron core is a PII core + the L2 cache. The CPU part is the same, but the die is different because of the additional cache. In fact, the Celeron die is approximately twice as big as the PII die. Because they are different, the Celerons and PIIs do not come off of the same production line. They do use the same fab process. Also, the Celerons are obviously not PIIs that failed some tests.
Yep, the Celeron 300A and above all have 128 K of L2 cache running at full core speed.
...But I'm still gonna make one! ;)
However, for SMP purposes, the cache size matters a lot. Since the two CPU's are sharing the memory bus, every cache miss means potential contention. Running large memory intensive programs on both CPU's simultaneously would almost certainly show significantly lower performance than same-clocked PII's with their 512K caches and much higher cache hit rate.
That is, in single CPU comparisons, the doubled speed of the Celeron almost makes up for the reduced cache hit rate relative to the PII. However, in dual-CPU configurations, the decreased cache hit rate of the Celerons carries the additional penalty of increased memory bus contention.
Geeky modern art T-shirts
Anybody who tries to compare any PC to a Starfire is obviously going to look silly -- if you're running a workload that the Starfire can run effectively (nicely parallel). But then again, throw together a Beowulf cluster with enough cheap PC's and run something that's reasonably close to embarrassingly parallel, and you're right up there in the list.
Somehow, it seems awfully cynical to call anything that's in the 3-digit mips and Mflops range a "puny toy". Any of these things has the raw CPU to blow a Cray-1 out of the water (of course, it doesn't have the memory bandwidth, but that's another matter). It's also a very large fraction of what we could do on a Connection Machine (CM-2) 10 years ago. Sure, I'm well aware that I can spend less on a processor than on the latest Star Wars toy for my nephew, and likewise that processor technology's advancing at an incredible rate, but these chips would have been called supercomputers not too many years ago.
And then I shudder to think how these things actually slow down as much as they do running Windows, and I can't imagine what must be going on that mere UI display (without any speech recognition) can bog one of these things down. Oh well, I guess I can just be smug about the fact that I can't even *run* Windows any more, since my last mobo upgrade...