Overview

With Quake3: Arena SMP support and Windows 2000 on the horizon, it looks like the beginning of a new mainstream multiprocessor revolution. Abit has fired the first shot with their release of the low cost BP6 dual 370-pin processor motherboard, but will the masses follow? We believe SMP will eventually become mainstream, and the Abit BP6 and Celeron 366 PPGA combo, the first low-cost, high performance SMP setup is a huge step in that direction. It's only starting to catch on among hardcore techies, but many products that become popular among extreme users eventually make it to the average Joe.

Why Celeron 366's? Can you say 550MHz?

In our first Celeron 366 Preview, we managed to overclock our Celeron 366 engineering sample up to 550MHz. Unfortunately, the actual Celeron 366 production models didn't overclock as well as our engineering sample. Few of the production model 366 processors could run at 550 without extra cooling, and many ignored the 366 as an overclocking CPU -until now.

This past month we've started hearing a lot about the new Celeron 366 processors. We heard from several different sources that the newest Celeron 366's can easily overclock to a minimum of 550MHz. One local hardware vendor told us that almost all of the new Celeron 366's that he's tested could do 550 with a standard heatsink/fan combo and little or no voltage tweaks. A few could reach speeds above 600MHz @ 2.3V. Another vendor e-mailed us with similar information.

Could this be the second coming of the 300A? It seems fitting that these new highly overclockable 366's started appearing right when the last of the 300A's are disappearing from vendor channels.