Performance Guide: Intel Celeron

Celeron Vs. Pentium III, Continued

The following table shows the differences between the Pentium III Coppermine and the Celeron.

As you can see in this table, the practical differences can be reduced to the following:

• The Pentium III as well as the Celeron 533A and up use the same core
• The Pentium III runs at 100 or 133 MHz system speed, while all Celerons are officially restricted to 66 MHz only . As the multipliers have only been defined up to x8.0, smaller multipliers had to be 'recycled':
• 
  x4.5 will work as x8.5 (Pentium III 850, Celeron 566)
  x5.0 will work as x9.0 (Celeron 600)
  x5.5 will work as x9.5 (Celeron 633)
  x6.0 will work as x10.0 (Celeron 667)
• The Celeron is equipped with only 128 kByte L2 Cache
• All new Celeron CPUs require 1.5V core voltage, while Pentium III models run at 1.60 or 1.65V (1.70V in case of the 933 and 1000 MHz version).

What both FC-PGA processors have in common is that they are very fragile. First, the plastic package makes the whole CPU lightweight. Second, the die is now exposed directly at the top of the processor. Thanks to this flip-chip technique, the heat sink will have direct contact to the die without the formerly used heat plate. This byproduct of high clock speeds is of course extremely important with respect to proper cooling.

Upgrading from the old to a new Celeron may be an interesting issue as well. In theory, every new Celeron should work in most Socket 370 motherboards. But as many motherboard companies did not implement low voltage support (down to 1.5V), lots of older boards can only be equipped with the Celeron 533 max (requiring 2.0V). The CPU multiplier cannot be changed for some years now, so the only two issues for upgrading are, first, the availability of a new BIOS, supporting the new Celeron and second, the support of 1.5 V core voltage . Information on both should be available at the website of your motherboard manufacturer.

I810/i810E

Naturally, Intel wants to address both the performance and the low end market. In order to reduce system costs, customers with low performance demands are suggested to combine the Celeron processor with an i810 motherboard. The i810 chipset comes with all features required by a standard business computer: Intel's fancy hub architecture, Integrated 2D/3D graphics, UltraDMA/66 IDE interface, AC97 sound system, two USB ports and support for 66, 100 (i810) and 133 MHz FSB (i810E).

As you can imagine, the integrated graphics controller is both a benefit and a big handicap. On the one hand, you basically do not need a graphics card any more, as the chipset takes over all graphics functions. In addition, the graphics logic of the chipset is able to make use of the main memory. This solution is very inexpensive indeed. However, we can only recommend i810 for computers that will never be used for demanding graphic applications or 3D games! As you will see later, the performance of Intel's integrated graphics really beggars belief.

Test Configuration