Introduction

Cheap thrills

With Athlon and Pentium 4 stealing all the limelight, it's easy to forget about the value chips from AMD and Intel, the Duron and Celeron. Sure, everyone loves reading about high performance parts, we've all dreamed of one day owning a Ferrari after all, but when times are tough, it helps to have a lower-priced alternative. Thankfully, the value chips we're looking at today provide just that, and you won't have to break the bank to afford one.

Don't believe us? Check out the latest CPU prices from Pricewatch. Today, Duron 900s are currently starting at $70 (Duron 800s for only $48!) and Intel's Celeron 800 starts at $86. Remember the days when Celeron 300As went for $100-$150? Thanks to AMD and Intel price cuts, obtaining a speedy system has never been easier!

Sure, 800MHz Celerons and 900MHz Durons sound boring in comparison to 1.33GHz Athlons and 1.7GHz Pentium 4s to the hardcore crowd. But we've got a little secret for you folks, these chips are easily capable of breaking 1GHz with a little bit of TLC (and no, we're not referring to the R&B group).

What does it take to own one of these swift budget systems? Besides the CPU, the other key ingredients are a good motherboard and video card. In fact, those of you with older BX systems don't even need a new motherboard. As we highlighted in our ABIT BH6+Celeron 566 upgrade article, today's 0.18-micron Celerons work just fine in older BX boards. Those of you still running Celeron 300A systems at 450MHz could be running at 1GHz right now!

In terms of video, price cuts from ATI and NVIDIA have sweetened the deal even more. GeForce2 MX boards can be found for under $100, but we recommend going with a RADEON 32MB DDR or GeForce2 GTS 32MB. Alan's hard at work testing STMicro's Kyro II right now, so we'll reserve final judgment on that card once it's released.

Celeron Overclocking

We purchased a Celeron 800 for comparison testing a few months back. Until now, it never really dawned on us to take a stab at overclocking this chip. Shame on us! The primary addition Intel has added to the Celeron 800 is its 100MHz system bus, previous Celerons utilized a 66MHz bus. As a result, the new 800 chips employ an 8.0x multiplier.

In terms of overclocking, the first bus speed we shot for was 133MHz. (8.0x133=1064). To get 1064MHz running stable, we had to bump the core voltage up to 1.75V, perfectly acceptable for a Celeron. Unfortunately, we weren't able to reach full stability at clock speeds much higher than that, our core hit the wall at 1072MHz, the speed we ran all our tests in. We were able to run tests with many Windows applications and games at clock speeds as high as 1120MHz, but at one point or another the system would lock up, even at up to 1.9V.