Introduction

We Love Celery

The Intel Celeron processor is by far our favorite overclocking chip. The abundance of BX motherboards and Celeron processors made celery systems the most common overclocked systems around. With jumperless motherboards and a never ending supply of overclockable chips from Intel, the Celeron is going to remain popular for the near future.

The Pentium III and Athlon processors do offer their respective SSE and 3DNow! instruction sets, but Intel and AMD's flagship processors are far more expensive than low-end Celerons. The Pentium III and Athlon do offers some serious performance gains, but some of us either aren't willing to pay for the performance, or we just like the idea of getting hundreds of dollars worth of performance out of a fifty or sixty dollar processor.

The Celeron may not be the overclocking king forever. The Pentium III FCPGA370 socket processor is on the horizon and the AMD K7 PGA isn't far behind. With the L2 cache on-chip, these two processors might have the ability to overclock as well as our beloved Celeron. The good news is that the Celeron line isn't going to die with Intel's introduction of Pentium III processors in the socket format, but the bad news is that the performance division between the Pentium 3 and the Celeron is going to widen. Coppermine Celerons with SSE won't even appear until the second half of next year while Coppermine Pentium 3 processors with 64KB L1 cache and 256KB on-chip L2 cache will reach +800MHz during the same period.

Mmmm… crunchy

Most of us don't have the patience to wait a whole year for new processors, and we'll have to find an inexpensive CPU to keep us occupied until then. While the new P3-450 and P3-500 processors would be the ideal overclocking CPUs, those on a budget will turn to the Celeron. Many of us already know the overclocking abilities of the 300A and the new 366, but what about the other Celerons?

We got our hands on a Celeron 400, a Celeron 433, and a Celeron 466. We made sure to get newer chips, because the new 366 magic should also applies to the other Celeron processors. Read on to find out what our tests revealed!