Re: [TCLUG:4691] building box, budget $1000

[Luke Francl <fran0382@tc.umn.edu>]

On Thu, 11 Mar 1999, Kevin R. Blum wrote:

> The Celeron chips have little or no L2 cache though.
> One report I heard was the Celeron 300 with no L2 cache ran similar to a
> Pentium 266, not much better than a 233MMX.  The Celeron 300a has 128kb L2
> cache but it's still a far cry from 512kb cache in a normal Pentium CPU.
> 

Most Celeron 300A's can be reliably overclocked to 450 MHz easily. At this
speed, they outperform a Pentium II 400 in all cases, as well as a PII 450
for most benchmarks. They may only have 128Kb of cache, but it runs at the
processors core speed, as opposed to 1/2 the core speed as on the P2. The
only draw back is heat, but if you get a good fan, that's not a problem. 

If I were buying a new system, I would go with a Celeron 300a in a
heartbeat. They're cheap (~$75) and the price-performance ratio can't be
beat. This is coming from a big AMD supporter, btw. (Bring on the K7!)

Luke