Overclocking

Installation

While installing this CPU, we were a bit hesitant due to the age of this board, and the limited support it offered officially. The most current bios update for my board (Abit BH6 ver 1.0) was the NV released on 11/26/99, well before the Celeron II ever came out. We theorized that maybe the voltage settings wouldn't work or maybe the motherboard wouldn't be able to support such a high multiplier. When the dust settled, we at FiringSquad thought it better to risk MY motherboard for the greater good.

Whoo weeee

All this hooha was dispelled in a matter of seconds. When we first loaded the chip in the computer, it was recognized as an 806EB. Odd, but we were just happy it called the Celeron something. What followed was a little bios tweaking. We set the FSB to 100MHz and adjusted the voltage accordingly to 1.60 V. The BH6 multiplier only goes up to 8, but the motherboard was still able to autodetect the 566's 8.5 multiplier.

My Little 300a

The Cel II with Heatsink

Off we went to load Windows, all went perfectly. At this point we were wondering what speed the CPU was running at since the motherboard had registered it as an 806EB. CPUId revealed the oh so great truth of 850 MHZ! We had a Celeron II working in an Abit BH6, running at 850 MHz. We ran a few tests benchmarks using Quake 3 and we had no troubles to speak of.

Turbo

Well we weren't quite satisfied. Sure one might think it's enough to have a CPU be compatible with a motherboard that is over two years old. But we here, want a little bit more. We were going to try and get a little bit more juice out of this baby. The Abit BH6 doesn't have too many FSB settings so we tried for 112 MHz. Either the RAM or the CPU failed, most likely the RAM since it is ancient. Undeterred, we sat down and realized that we could still squeeze a little more by enabling the turbo setting. Remember that little option? It upped our FSB to 103 MHz. It might not seem like much of a jump, but remember, we are dealing with a multiplier of 8.5, giving us an extra 25.5 MHz. CPUId registered a final speed of 877 MHz. Not too shabby, a 55% increase in speed over spec.

Odd Indeed

Odd Cubed

Latency

If you haven't read about these little Celermines, here is a little blurb: (to learn more read the Celeron 566 article. There are only three large factors that make this chip differ from a Coppermine. The new Celerons come with 128KB of L2 cache that has a latency setting of 2; the Coppermine is set at 0. The other two factors are of course the reduced cache size (Coppermine at 256KB L2) and the reduced bus speed. Since most Coppermines either come at a 133MHz, or can be overclocked to it, this will give them somewhat of an advantage. The Celeron II would have one hell of a time reaching a FSB of 133; this leaves only one more option, changing the latency setting of the cache. We attempted to change the latency setting of the cache but failed to do so. We didn't get to make this a neutered Coppermine, but the results weren't too shabby.