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Celeron 466 - Good Or Bad?
CitizenC asks: "My current system is a Pentium 166MMX, 64 Megs SD Ram. Video card is a Creative Labs Voodoo Blaster Banshee PCI, 16Meg. I'm thinking about upgrading to the Pentium 2-3 range, however, Im currently experiencing a money problem. (The problem being that I dont have enough.) When I asked around, I kept hearing good things about the newer generation of Celeron processors. Thus, my question is this: If I were to get an Intel Celeron 466, would it be a good choice, given that I do alot of 3D gaming? If not, why? And if so, what motherboard should I get?"
And remember: Geeks always love computer upgrades as Christmas presents.
I am using a C466 adapted via a dual-doard-capable adapter to a Gigabyte Slot1-bx-board and I like it. I have had uptimes 30d+ so I can say it runs stable :-)
Seti@home does run about as fast as it would on a PII 300, it's even better for other apps.
Overall, I think the Celerons have a very good price/performance ratio. This ratio improves dramatically if you are willing to do some overclocking. The on-die cache of the celeron makes them much more stable for overclocking than their Pentium compadres. That being said, overclocking does have its drawbacks, especially if you don't really want to put in the effort required to do things right. For example, I have a Abit BP6 dual celeron 366 system overclocked to 550. I got the chips from a well known supplier (http://www.advanceddesignky.com/) who pre-tested the chips and guaranteed they'd work at 550. I spent a little extra to get some massive heatsinks and 2 case fans, but after a month or so, I'm quite confident that heat won't be a problem. One thing to consider (especially for a 3d gamer) is whether the PIII extensions will be heavily utilized in the next few years. Right now it's not much of an issue. Anyway, this is a rather long winded way of saying I think the celerons are a good deal, especially when OC'd. If you're going to overclock though, save yourself some headaches and get quality components. (PC100 RAM, reliable hard drive, good network/video/etc cards.) Get pretested and guaranteed chips from a respected vendor, and don't skimp on the cooling. (Use a good thermal grease, and apply it correctly.) Done properly, you'll have a powerful system at a very good price. (No way I could have afforded a dual pentium system...)
The Celery series procs have been pretty okay in the latest incarnations. Okay performance for the price. For heavy 3D gaming, you might consider upgading the video card instead. I have a VooDoo2 in an P200MMX(overclocked 166) that ran circles around my buddy with a PII 400 with a cheap "onboard" AGP video. You could save yourself a bundle, and then upgrade the rest later when money isn't such a problem. If you still feel the need to replace the board, ASUS has always been good to me. ABIT has a some good boards. TYAN has some kick ass platters, too. A good place to check would be http://www.maximumpc.com/ for hardware reviews. Good resource. If you stick to an Intel BX chipset, you'll be pretty safe. If anyone disagrees with me, fine. Just my $0.02CDN.
My bubble memory went *pop*
You couldn't ask for much more in terms of games. Megahertz for megahertz, the Celeron matches both the P2 and P3 in speed on non-SSE enabled games. It's extremely cheap (my Celeron was actually the cheapest component in my entire sytem except for the floppy drive) so you can overclock the hell out of em without worrying too much about electromigration. If you're looking for the most speed possible I would get a 400 which overclocks fine to 500. I haven't heard very many success stories about overclocking a 466, but hey, it could happen. So, as long as you don't plan on playing any SSE games (of which there aren't that many anyways), it's actually a waste of your money to buy a P3, and a P2 is essentially no more than a more expensive Celeron.
--
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
celerons are hands down the best processors to buy if you're on a budget and don't let anyone tell you any different. you can pick up a 466 for less than US$70 right now and with some cooling it should overclock to 550 easy. if you go with a 366 celeron you should still be able to overclock it 500+ with cooling - intel's yields on celerons are very good, so a lot of the time there is little difference between the slower and faster models besides the 'official' clock rate. i've read about celeron 300As overclocked past 600mhz. performance is usually about the same as a p2/p3 at the same clock rate (though the celerons use a slower bus...)
i'll have to respectfully disagree with the last poster: you'd be crazy to upgrade the 16 meg banshee when you've got a 166 in there. your processor is much farther behind than your video card.
if visit this site on a regular basis you won't go wrong: www.anandtech.com
it's a slashdot-esque site dealing only with the x86 hardware industry (mainly the gaming side of it...). they link to stories/reviews/etc that other good hardware sites publish. there are many nice hardware sites out there, if you look at anandtech you will quickly find some good ones.
this page does a 'weekly cpu price guide' article in which they also recommend which cpus they think are the best to buy: www.sharkyextreme.com
if i were going to buy a computer right now it'd definitely have an abit bp6 mainboard with a pair of overclocked celerons.
I have 2 celeron 300A systems clocked at 464. I have 3 suggestions.
:) You didn't mention whether your 3D gaming is under windows or linux, and a dual processor setup is pretty much useless for win9x gaming, at least until the SMP win2K release is stable.
First, go get a celeron especially if you're a bit short on cash. The bang for the buck is waaay up there.
Second, make sure you get a good motherboard. I use ABIT motherboards almost exclusively because they make good overclocking boards and they are very easy to set up. I'm sure there are other, more stable boards out there but ABIT works for me. There is also a dual celeron processor capable ABIT board out there, I think it's the BP6.
Third, visit some web sites that offer celeron/motherboard/ram packages and see what you can get. There are places that will sell you a celeron 366 guaranteed to run at 550mhz for right around the price of a "real" celeron 466. Check out http://www.computernerd.com for examples of what I'm talking about. They're not the only site out there though.
If you get a dual processor mobo and eventuallly get 2 of those celeron 366's clocked at 550 each, you would be running a pretty darn fast linux box
Good luck!
I'm easily able to O/C up to 488 or so, and past 500 when I'm not doing anything graphic (which I suspect is the AGP vid card's fault.
I'm not sure how a 466 would affect your ability to OC, if that's your thing, but the 433 all on it's own is more than sufficient for current games. You're likely to hit another limit before your processor gets to be too slow, like not enough RAM, or a fast enough graphics board.
Check my Go-related blog for beginners: DGD
ComputerNerd's site offers an ABIT motherboard, with dual overclocked celerons. Has anyone used one of these? Do the standard Linux distributions work well on them? Thanks!
Friend of mine has the following spec. Abit BP6, 2 Celeron 400 PPGA chips overclocked to 500, 256M PC100 RAM. He's been running his machine for a month without any problems (RAM must be set at 83Mhz). He is a graphic designer, so he ran a test himself to see how the Celeron compared to PIII. His machine was 8 sec faster than a Dual PIII 500 1G RAM from SGI when rendering an image with 3D StudioMax. It's hard to believe, isn't it? I decided to "Merry Xmas myself" the same machine!
Well, I've been doing a ton of research on the mobo/c466 combo I hope to be recieving for xmas. I've heard good things about the c466, except for the fact that they dont overclock as well as the others. The c466's multiplier is locked at 7, so you can only modify the fsb speed to oc it. It defaults at 7.0x66mhz, which gets you 464mhz. Most people I've talked to can get it up to 7.0x75mhz at 525mhz with no problem, and a few say they've got it up to 7.0x83mhz, or 581mhz with good cooling. As for mobos, if your running linux or another SMP supporting OS, I would definitely reccommend the Abit BP6. This mobo kicks some serious ass and its the only dual celeron board out right now. It also is great for OCing. I have talked to a few people who are currently using dual c366s oc'd to 525 with a TNT2 Ultra vid card and they say it kicks serious gaming ass. If your looking for a cheap kickass gaming machine, this is definitely the way to go.
- clowns are evil
Get a slower Celeron (366 or 400) & overclock it and you will be much happier. Because the multiplier is fixed the bus speed is determined by how much you can overclock it. Everything over 400 doesn't overclock so well so the bus speed is severley limited. It makes a huge difference in apparent and real speed. Myself, I'm very happy w/ running 2 celeron 400's at 550 mHz. It kicks some ass.
Later,
-J
The only way you're going to afford the system you want is a two-fold fiscal approach. First, you must write free software. Second you must tithe 10% of your yearly income to the FSF, and another 10% to the EFF.
By tithing your current income, you will feel all warm and fuzzy inside and your god [Krishna, Buddha, Ra, Zeus, Jehovah, The Yeti, Feynman, Pauling, RMS, ESR, the gun, quantum particle 0x0655EFD0, whatever...] will be vengefull, "That's my money, damnit!" will thunder across the land. This is where the free software comes in.
Once you have created the software, just sit back. Your tithe will make the FSF and EFF protectful of your software rights (as long as they do not interfere with the end-user's rights). They have a word processor (or EMACS) and will use it if necessary to call for a boycott. In 1-2 years a company will embrace your software and allow you to purchase 100 F&F shares at the IPO time. When the stock hits $50 on opening day, sell it. You can now buy a nice system and tithe the required 20%.
It will take a little while, but you'll be able to buy a better system than a Celeron.
In answer to you original query. The celeron will work just fine for almost all personal workstation duties. Load up on the memory and you will not notice a difference between a real PII and the Celeron. The $130 price for a 500Mhz makes it hard to pass up.
I built two systems this summer. Both had overclocked Celron 366's.
My friend has way too good a job for a young single guy and wanted a great computer for gaming. We decided that an overclocked 366 would be just the ticket. We got two celron 366's for $148 off of E-Bay; he'd get the one that could do 550 and I'd take the other one and put together a 366 system out of less expensive parts.
His system has an ABIT BE-6 motherboard, a Viper 770 Ultra video card, and a Western Digital ATA66 hard drive, name brand CAS2 memory, and an ASUS Slotket adapter.
For my 366 system I purchased an A-Trend bx motherboard (I don't have it here with me as I'm at work right now) mainly because it was cheap, a $50 8mb AGP video card, no name CAS3 memory (I'm pushing it to CAS2), and a Jet Slotket converter (very cheap).
We put his system together first. We carefully sanded the Celeron slug and heatsink down flat. Put a thin layer of thermal grease on. The machine came up and ran but wasn't very stable until we upped the voltage to 2.3 volts. We tried both CPUs and it didn't seem to make much difference. This system isn't the very picture of stability but it's good enough.
Then I built my system after I got done scrounging the parts (on the cheap as much as possible). I wanted to see if it would overclock to 550 but I was expecting that it would not. This thing is quite solid at 550. This thing is running
Windows 98 on it so I'm not going to say it never hangs but I don't think I have hardware issues. By the way there is no voltage adjustment on this board so I'm running standard voltage.
So if you're going to overclock a 366 be carefull about installing the heat sink. Don't believe everything you read about motherboards. Choose your video card for stability. I think that my friend's system is held back because Diamond hasn't put out any new drivers for that video card.
All generalizations are false, including this one. Mark Twain
I have an ABIT BX6 Rev. 2 mobo with a celeron 366 clocked at 550 without a hitch. It runs very nice, doen't overheat (I only have one extra fan) and the performance is fantastic. The celerons provide an excellent price/performance value, especially when overclocked. Definitely highly recommended!
Anyone seen the BogoMIPS counter on a linux box with a Celeron... Please.. if you're thinking about a celeron.. at least get an AMD... they cost the same and they work a bit better.. Who cares... I'd rather have the L1 cache..
I've tried to search for some pricing info(specifically on pricewatch.com) and many return results that says "not overclockable". So where or how do I tell if one is overclockable? Are there differences between OEM and retail version or steppings, etc?
Well i have an Abit BP6 with two 466s, and have found them to be stable up to 560 with stock intel heatsink/fan combos.
I've heard of people taking 366s to the same speed, but in my opinion the chances of that succeeding are much lower.
The main disadvantage with going with 466s vs something slower in the context of overclocking is the high multiplier of 7.0. What this does is pushes the FSB (Front Side Bus) possibilites much lower than is possible with lower multiplier Celerons. So, it is important to use a board with many FSB options.
I have found performance at 560 (80 Mhz FSB) to be excellent, and the system handles multi-tasking superbly.
Good Luck
forget Celery systems unless you are going to go dual. if you are sticking to a single cpu system, the AMD K6-2 or even K6-III would be a far better way to go. I've seen the K6-2 475 for $63 and I'm sure you could get it cheaper. Not only do many games support the chips' 3DNow instructions, but they have a 100MHz FSB (instead of the celery's slower 66MHz FSB). i've got a K6-2 450 system with 128mb pc100 sdram and a couple 7200 rpm ide drives with a Voodoo3 3000 AGP/16mb video card and this box is great for playing any game i've seen on it. and that, ladies and gentlemen, would be my 2 cents.
Perl - $Just @when->$you ${thought} s/yn/tax/ &couldn\'t %get $worse;
``Hi, my name is Joe Slashdotuser, and like all geeks out there who read Firingsquad, Anandtech, MaximumPC or the completely-dead-for-two-years Tom's Hardware Guide, I have to say that you should use a celeron 8Mhz and overclock it to 1.21Ghz (after all that's what I do in my system). Yes, I spent $400 on cooling supplies to get it there, and have to reinstall Windows NT every three days, but to get a CPU for $10 less than the next properly tested CPU was worth it.''
``Screw you, Joe! I'm Jane Slashdotfiend, and I think your brainwashed ways are corrupting the youth of our society as well as all the other posters here. The only REAL chips that gamerz use come from AMD. Sure, once overclocked to 1.3Ghz (which is faster than your cpu), they burn holes in the side of my case such that I have no need for a microwave, but I save $40 off a comparable Intax chip and don't support the Evil Empire.''
I don't understand WHAT is with this elitist viewpoint of overclocking and being flat out *cheap* on CPU purchases. Granted, I'll be the first one in line to say it's silly to spend double the price for 50MHz more from a PIII (according to Intel's tests, anyway), but when you dump all this money into a motherboard and six billion megahertz SDRAM, why are you skimping on the CPU?
Now, for `normal' PCs, I'd get a Celeron in a heartbeat. They're cheap. They're fast. They're from a company that's in bed with Microsoft, so it'll definately work with their operating systems for at least a few more years. (Note: I'm talking about a Mom-worthy system in this paragraph, not a geek system.) Around the office, they're perfect, too. Save a few hundred bucks... you don't need that extra 128K of cache anyway.
If you're building a box for a game system, sure, get the celeron... you can always upgrade to something else later. Or, hey, spend the $50-$100 extra to get a PIII. Those SIMD instructions are spiffy. And they're not THAT much more expensive. It's your choice. There's NOT THAT MUCH difference in performance OR price (pricewatch says ~$100... in an thousand dollar system, that's less than 10% of the price. Considering you're Internet ordering, that probably covers the sales tax you're saving; I assume, of course, you're ordering all your components from ONE vendor, right? Otherwise you'll pay more than $100 in shipping all the stuff just to save $8 on that motherboard you want).
Now, what I don't understand is the militant support of ``overclocking.'' Yeah, I've heard a billion times that the chips are the exact same core blah blah blah, but I enjoy paying extra for a chip that Intel will guarantee for that speed. I don't want to skimp and then realize ``oh, gee, it DOESN'T actually go that fast.'' Of course, I'm also the freak who actually gets the retail processors, since you get a fan and heatsink included, and oh yeah a three year almost-no-questions-asked warranty from one of the few tech companies that probably WILL be around in three years. (Them and Cisco, but that's one of my other rants.)
There's a difference between being economical and being CHEAP. And most of these gamers who are recommending hardware out there (and buying it, for that matter) are in the second category. Get over it. Stop preaching and go support the economy.
-Chris
The Sharky Extreme Overclocking Guide claims that 75% of Celeron 466 can be overclocked to 525 MHz, that all 400 MHz CPUs can be overclocked to 450 MHz, and 85% to 498 MHz.
This led me to the conclusion that a 400 MHz Celeron might be better than a 466 MHz, due to the greater likelyhood of overclockability, and the fact that successfull overclocking will give a faster bus speed (83 MHz for 400 oc'd to 498 MHz).
Is there a flaw in my reasoning? Am I Comments?
Okay this is kinda funny...I have an all scsi system, 6x scsi dvd, 18.2 gig u2w (atlas4), voodoo3 3000, soundblaster live, etc. All in all a very nice system. But when it came time to get processors I wanted to hang with what I had (a pII450) until the dual Athlon boards came out. But this system was too slow so I upgraded to a dual celeron system (366=>500 as is so common) because I wanted to keep the money I had saved up for the Athlon system. Now we all know dual overclocked celerons run very hot and if any of you have ever run an atlas 4 you know they get even hotter....then theres the voodoo3 (too hot to touch)and the chipset on the motherboard (a bp6 of course) gets EXTREMELY hot. However, even with all this heat is not a problem provided you have a couple of decent fans...add some peltiers and several big fans and you shouldn't have the slightest problem...oh and my system is very stable (surprisingly) I wouldn't get the 466 though...a 300A is better...trust me you need 100MHZ bus...and the 300As are almost always good at 450...some sites even garauntee stability so you really can't go wrong..I believe I have written too much. Hope this has been informative or at least not too boring.
If you have a choice between buying a 80 horse power car and the exact same model but then with a 120 horse power engine, for exactly the same price, wouldn't you want to go with the 120 horse power version ? Or would that be too cheap, and would you voluntarily pay more money, if only to support the economy ?
Granted, it's not exactly the same as the situation. Suppose you'd buy a car with 80 horse power, and get the extra hardware to chip tune your car upto 120 horse power. By chip tuning it, you'd void your warrenty on the engine of the car, but you know that 99 % of the people who have done the procedure never had any trouble with their engine. You know that on average, your engine will last shorter. On the other hand, it's also a well known fact that the life expectancy of the rest of the car is still lower then that of a chip tuned engine.
Now you have to make a choice ....
Did you notice that word? I'll repeat it: choice. That is the key thing here, since it is up to you. If you ask others for advice, gather the real information and ignore the subjective oppinions.
So what if somebody thinks it's cheap? If you feel confortable with taking a short cut, then go for it.
On the other hand, so what if somebody thinks you're being stupid by choosing the safest path? If that is what you think is best, then ignore any comments on that.
Some last info: I run a Pentium 75 on 90 MHz for years now without a glitch. I did invest in solid hardware though, so in the end, the price was about the same, but I feel more confident about having name brand components with good support.
The Celeron is both in normal as in overclocked situations a good chip in price/performance. If you cannot afford the fastest CPU on the block but still want solid hardware and a clear upgrade path, this is your best choice, both overclocked as at the normal clock speed.
BLaH(c)
You say that the K6-2/K6-III are better because of their 100mhz FSB... a K6-III 450 running at 450 mhz costs more than a celeron 366 running at 550, and the celery has the same FSB when overclocked. And let's not forget the abysmal mathematical performance of the K6-2/K6-III...
Blah Blah... I overclocked my 400MHz Celeron to 600MHz with no extra cooling besides the stock fan. Blah blah... perfectly stable... Blah blah...
I just wish i could overclock my 400mhz Celeron based laptop :) -- Eric Windisich
and have no humour center. They just like to sit around and p*ss people off at slashdot. Like me, the anti-moderator. My bets are all on that this funny post will sit at -1, flamebait forever because slashdot moderators are about as smart as the tech support at Microsoft
Let me explain the joke to the thicker skulled:
BogoMips aren't real. They have no effect on the speed of your computer. So, to say a computer is fast because it gets more bogomips is like saying Red Ferraris are faster than blue. It means NOTHING.
So, saying "How fast is a BogoMip" is funny because it is like saying "What is the difference between a naught and a zero?".
Clues, Clues, Clues! Get your Clues here! 1 karma point gets you 1 clue! Only 1 avaliable here! Buy yours while it is still here! Clues, Clues, Clues...
Don't EVER buy from a vendor that ADVERTISES their celerons are not overclockable... They may be telling "the truth" or "THE TRUTH".
"the truth"
Yeah, not overclockable because they are remarked (This info might be out of date - do they still try to pull this scam off?) to a higher speed, and won't go any higher.
"THE TRUTH"
The company just doesn't want to get it's ass burned if you buy one from them, and it won't overclock well.
Take yer pick...