Introduction

Celeron Lore

Turn back the clock people. Remember back to the days of the old Celeron. Back when the mighty 266, 300a, and 366 ruled the motherboards. First we started with the 266 and soon discovered the benefits of the 300A, and that oh so essential thing called L2 cache. Much later the 366 earned its' rank in that category. We now have the same story playing out again, except with the second generation of Celerons. Only time will tell how it will turn out.

In case you have fallen a little behind in the Celeron II scene check out our previous Celeron II articles to see how the new Intel CPUs differ from their older counterparts. Essentially, the newer 533A, 566, and 600MHz Celerons are based on Intel's new flip-chip plastic grid array (FC-PGA) packaging and are built on a smaller, 0.18-micron process. The processor core contains 128KB 4-way set associative L2 cache running at the same speed as the processor core, and, like previous Celerons, the front side bus still runs at 66MHz.

Love at first...

Our first experiences with the Celeron II 566 were quite a surprise. While these little kickers don't provide as much power as the Coppermine, their price more than makes up for it. We managed to get the 566 purring at 900 MHz. Man, it's like we're watching a repeat of the past two years except in double-speed. Well anyways, seeing the success we had with the 566 made us a bit curious about its sibling the 600. We wondered if this little munchkin would hit the coveted Gigahertz mark.

Troubles A Brewin'

Along with the super high clock speeds there are other little numbers that are rising steadily. This will mark the beginning of high multiplier settings. The Celeron 566 ships with a locked multiplier of 8.5x, the 600 9.0x. This can be seen as good and bad. Remember how we were ecstatic about the 1-2MHz bus increments offered by the BE6-II and BF6? With both of these motherboards, we're able to maximize the headroom left in our CPU by pushing the clock speed to just under the limit of the core. Well now we have a problem.