Celeron 600

.5 MHz?

These high multipliers are going to need even smaller bus increments to achieve success with overclocking the new Celerons: with each additional jump in bus speed comes a considerable increase in end speed. In the case of the 600, each notch up increases the speed by 9 MHZ. So even a 2 MHz jump could miss that little extra speed we all look for. Who knows, we might even see .5 MHz bus increments in the future to compensate for the high multiplier settings. The benefit of the high multiplier is altogether too obvious. Look at it. We got a 566 to 900MHz while still keeping the rest of the system within spec. Need I say more?

We know that Intel will release future Celeron IIs with even higher clock speeds. One has to wonder how much longer they will keep raising the multiplier rather than raise the FSB to 100MHz. If this keeps up I might have to use my calculator to do the math. I am terrible at simple arithmetic, but if you give me a triple integral I'm good to go.

Clockerwatchers

If you haven't noticed our test motherboard hasn't changed all that much in quite a while. Even though RDRAM and all those new fangled 820 boards are out we pretty much stick to the tried and tested Abit BE6 Rev2. Occasionally we use the VIA 133A chipset but BX is still considered our standard platform. The BX chipset has had quite a long lifespan. We know that Micron will be showing off their DDR samples at WinHEC next week in New Orleans. We're anxiously anticipating this new crop of RAM and motherboards for use in the near future.

Without further ado lets discuss our overclocking results with the Celeron II 600MHz! We sat down and threw this little guy in our BE6-II. We wanted to make this one earn its' keep. Starting at a 100MHz FSB we got the system to boot and run at 900MHz. Feeling a bit gustier, we next went for 112MHz and but got nothing. The system would POST at 1008MHz but failed to boot into Windows 98. After laying off a bit, the system booted at 954 and loaded windows. All benchmark programs crashed back to Windows, forcing us to go a bit lower. We ended up pushing it to around 945MHz. This resulted in a FSB of 105MHz (9x105=945). Not exactly what I would have liked, but we don't always get what we want.