Intel Celeron 566 (7/7) Conclusion
The Celeron offers good performance at a fair price, even though it is noticeably handicapped by its smaller cache. Naturally it's very fast at 850 MHz (on a 100MHz FSB), but you may have to jump through a couple of hoops to get it there. Judging from what I've read on the internet, I guess I got stuck with a particularly difficult specimen. That just goes to show that there just isn't any guarantee that your chip will overclock - there are good batches of Celerons and there are not-so-good ones. If you're the lucky owner of an Abit BE6-II, you have some options besides 100MHz FSB, like lowering FSB to 90 for example. Even though you're underclocking the PCI bus by 2 MHz and the AGP bus by 5 MHz, you're rewarded with a 40% increase in CPU performance. Nonetheless, even a Celeron (II) running at 850 MHz is not a full-fledged PIII. Its smaller cache slows it down and lets a 250MHz slower PIII E pass it by. I decided against testing the PIII at higher speeds (like 800 or 850), as these (retail) parts are not nearly in the same price range as the processors tested here. In everyday use, the Celeron is heavily handicapped by the 66 MHz FSB. In some scenarios it is even outperformed by a Celeron 300A running at 464 MHz (103MHz FSB). Where pure computingpower is concerned, it can hold its own, though. Give it some PIII optimized programs to munch on, and it really starts to fly. Still, a PIII 600E will give you better results - well, and set you back by an extra 200 DM..... On the whole, this was a very exhausting experience for me. At the same time, it was also very, well, educational. I wouldn't have believed what differences there could be between mainboards in terms of overclocking friendliness. That's why the real winner of this match is Abit! I can´t really say what Abit is doing here to get more stability in terms of overclocking. One last word: If you want to buy a Cerleron 566 and overclock it you might have no problems at all. BUT:There is a risk that you have a situation like we had in our review. I just want to let you know this before you spent your hard earned money. Maybe you´re lucky, maybe you´re not. Check www.overclockers.com for more infos on that topic. Lars "Borsti" Weinand - Mai 2000
English Translation by: Benjamin Kraft - ThanX again for the great work Ben! Opinions? Questions? - Check our Forum. |
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| Copyright: 16.06.2000
(Tanslation by Benjamin Kraft)- RIVA Station 2000 - Lars Weinand URL of this Article: www.rivastation.com/cel566_e.htm - If you want to link to it, please use this URL! :-) |
