INTEL CELERON 800 REVIEW

 

Ever since it came out , Ive wanted the celeron 800 cpu, Its the cpu Intel should have given users over a year ago. No not a 800 celeron but rather a 100mhz bus celeron cpu. The Duron cpu has made the 66mhz bus celerons obsolete by todays standards , and the stance taken by Intel not to release a 100mhz bus celerom earlier , has only driven more users to the AMD camp so to speak. A lot of tech sites have abandoned the intel cpu's in droves and finding a tech site running intel products today is very hard indeed . The price of the celeron 800 at release was also ridiculous , at over twice the cost of a comparable duron 800 , the celeron was not the bargain cpu intel was telling us it was. Well half a year has gone bye and the price has come down far enough for me to buy one. Compared to the duron 800 its still overpriced , and will not perform as well .

   Enough complaining , on to the tests. Sisoft Sandra 2001 was used to benchmark the cpu and 3DMARK2001 as well. The first test will be with the celeron 800 ar default speed.

 

 

As we can see from the results the celeron 800 falls right in between the Duron 600 and P3 1GHZ cpu's. On to the multimedia benchmark.

Again we get similar results with the celeron 800 falling in between the Duron 600 and P3 1 GHZ cpu's. Next we will try  3DMARK2001 with everything at stock speed including the vid card.

 I hate to say it but , nothing a 566 celeron OCed to 95mhz bus speed (807mhz) could not do , and for less money. So the only thing to do to get some serious value for money is to see if and how much we can OC this cpu. The goal being 1ghz at the very least.

   OVERCLOCKING THE CELERON 800.

  Well this is where we find out if the celeron was worth buying, at first I pushed the celeron up the bus speed scale one step at a time all the way to 120mhz bus @ 1.7v . Well I got all excited at this turn off events, but to get the system to boot at 124mhz bus took 1.9volts for 992mhz cpu clock speed. And to get a boot at 126mhz bus took all off 2 volts for a 1008mhz cpu clock. At least the cpu takes the 2 volts and at least we made it to 1ghz. The good thing is that it runs stable at 1008mhz @ 2v , the bad thing is , at 20deg Celsius room temp it maxes out at 41deg C under full load. Was kind of hoping for more speed and less heat, but a month from now the cpu may settle down , and burn in as they say , I hope. On to the GHZ benchmarks.

As you can see from the results the celeron equals the p3 1ghz cpu in the Dhrystone test and actually just beats it in the Whetstone test and comes awfully close to the P4 in performance. Next the multi media test.

 This time the celeron beats the p3 in both the Intege SSE and Floating-Point SSE tests, and the P4 takes a serious lead , as a 1.5ghz cpu should. Now lets have a look at the 3DMARK2001 test results.

 The graphics card was OCed to 185mhz core and 195mhz mem , from the default speeds of 175mhz core, and 165mhz mem. I just could not get the card to run 190mhz core speed , as I had done the other day to record 2031 3Dmarks . So a score of 1951 3Dmarks will just have to do.  The Geforce 2 mx is definitely the bottle neck to performance at the moment as there have only been minor FPS increases in Quake at 800x600 screen res. The other thing Im finding now is that my ATA66 5400rpm HDD is now holding things back. At 800mhz its not really noticeable but at 1ghz, you better believe it , you feel the lack of speed from the HDD. And the performance gain from OCing the cpu to 1ghz is hardly noticeable with the current graphics card, when playing games. Oh the trials and tribulations of having too fast a cpu. hehehehehe. yeah right.