Tech Link (Processor): Celeron 430 @ 3ghz vs FX-57 @ 3160mhz , the new Celeron rocks

PcCI2iminal of XS has posted a head to head battle between a Celeron (which I posted so long ago already) and an FX-57. And guess who won? Well, it's a FanBoy site so you'll probably know it's the Cely :)...

How the title says:

Celeron 430 @ 3ghz vs FX-57 @ 3160mhz

Cinebench
Celeron 430 -> 473
FX-57 -> 435

Source:Celeron 430 @ 3ghz vs FX-57 @ 3160mhz , the new Celeron rocks

Brag: Hitting the 5GHz+ overclock, reaching the dream!

I still remember how my jaw dropped seeing THG broke the 5GHz wall for the first time. It was like nothing I have ever seen before. Of course, nowadays, I have gotten used to extreme cooling, but back then, the most extreme I have ever ventured to is water cooling. If you haven't seen the THG review yet, I suggest you watch this video. (Expand to read the rest of the Blog)


That video will make even those who have the experience to overclock to understand that it takes more than mere guts to do such wonder. Not only does one needs uber hardware in terms of processor, motherboard, memory and other related peripherals, but also be ready to spend a lot of money in terms of cooling and modification needed to attain such speed. Of course, a lot of time is also needed to do such.

While it is usually just a matter of time before processor technology matures and reach such speed on stock, Intel dropped their 4GHz plan and so this becomes more like a dream for me. There's just no way 5GHz will be available anytime soon, specially with Conroe running at 1.83GHz for a start.

Fast forward to today, and while nothing has changed on the Conroe front of things, 65nm on NetBurst has matured already. In fact, I am so much into these new cores that I have already forgotten I have these babies in stashed and ready for the picking. And in one lazy afternoon, I pried open one of the box just for the heck of it and achieve 4GHz without breaking a sweat.

That 4GHz moment has triggered something in my OC tastebud and I quickly felt something special for this Cedar Mill core, which is the last of the NetBurst breed for single core. During my lazy time, I tried pushing it more and found out that 4.4GHz is reachable with stock vCore on stock cooler, and it can run all benchmarks just fine. It is rock stable at this settings.

Feeling more brave and even more enthusiastic this time around, I reached for 50% overclock, which is not something common for processors based on NetBurst. After doing a little adjustment on my rockin' Intel D975XBX2 board with value DDR2-800MHz RAM, I targetted for 200MHz (800MHz QPB) and I hit it with flying colors: 4.8GHz easy.

I am very excited, 4.8GHz is reached with a lowly 1.4v and bench stable. I never tried to run any long term benchmark at this speed compared to the 4.4GHz overclock.

At 4.8GHz, I only wanted to see if I can reach my dream. I feel like I am going against all odds here. Sure, the signs all points to a good start, I reached 4.4GHz, and even higher with just a minor adjustment, but bootstrap is now becoming a concern for me. With an unmodded Bad Axe 2, I know I am still good to go, I just need to figure out how to make this baby work at 5GHz, which is 209MHz FSB.

So after doing some testing and trial and error, I manage to find out the sweet spot of the Bad Axe 2 and broke 200MHz FSB with 133MHz bootstrap. It is all smoothsailing afterwards, and I reached my dream clock speed of 5GHz. Below is the image in its full glory!



The final settings is 1.45v on vCore, 209MHz FSB, on stock cooling! While 5GHz is already a "has been", doing it on stock cooler is not something anyone will see everyday. That's all for the day, FanBoy out.

Test Bench (1:1)
Intel® Celeron® D 352 (3.2GHz) with stock cooler
Intel® D975XBX2
Samsung* PC2-6400 (2x512MB, DDR2-800)
Delta* Power Supply 450w
Inno3D* PCI Video Card
Seagate* IDE Hard Drive
LG* DVD ROM Drive

Brag: 4.4GHz is history, meet 4.8GHz on stock cooler

Woohoo, this is done on a stock cooler with 1.4v on the CPU. It's SuperPi 1M stable and I have also done a wPrime32m run last night. I haven't done any other benching aside from that, but hey, 4.8GHz with 1.4v on 32c ambient temp? Wow! Click on the image for the validation link.

That's all for today, FanBoy out!

Brag: A 4.44GHz easy with stock vCore, on stock cooler!

_{Update( 02/27/2007): I have uploaded the validation, click this link.}
When I set up my Cedar Mill CPU, I am not expecting so much from this processor. I am thinking, 3.6GHz tops, on a stock cooler and maybe a notch of vCore for 100% stability. As you can see from that link, I hit 4GHz and I am not even spending any 'real' effort.

I was happy, 4GHz for such a cheap CPU is nice! I didn't tweak anything as far as CPU is concerned. I only played around with memory ratio, whether to set it at 1:1, or better but that's not really much of a concern. The fact that this processor booted without problem at 4GHz and completed anything and everything I throw at it, it's already quite an accomplishment.

So just for the heck of it, I decided to just push it even more. At 4.44GHz, I started some benchmarks. Prime95 is chewing along nicely, completing more than 8Hrs+ of stability. Overnight 3DMark01 is completed as well. I even tried running Aquamark03, 3DMark03, 3DMark05, 3DMark06 as well as PCMark02, PCMark04, and PCMark05.

I'll try and post up the CPU-Z validation later, I'll post some benchmark scores as well. I'll update this post later on, for now, just click on that image above to see the full image.

FanBoy out!

Brag: A 4GHz fun run with Intel® Celeron® D 352 [3.2GHz] (Cedar Mill)

Ok, I know I haven't installed the 3rd and last CPU which I have to check and see if it's a Penryn-based CPU. But hey, after posting the first one which happened to be a Conroe-L
and the second to be an Intel® Core™ 2 Duo E6320 I really don't have my hopes up. So I am just leaving it there in the box and decided to try a known CPU which I haven't played on yet.

This is Presler's younger brother. If you have been keeping up to breast with Intel processors, these Intel® Pentium® D 900 series overclocked well even if they are dual core. So I also have my hopes up for this Cedar Mill baby, the single core edition of Pressler based on 65nm.

As you can see from the CPU-Z screen (click on the image for the validation link), it's a hefty 4GHz clockage. It is stable with stock vCore of 1.27v on stock heatsink. And when I say stable, it can complete these benchmarks:

• SuperPi 32m


• PCMark04


• PCMark05


• Prime95 for one(1) hour

This is a great budget CPU, specially for HTPC though a bit dated in terms of technology. But hey, if you're a FanBoy, anything and everything Intel is good-to-go. That's all for the day, hope you have a great day. FanBoy out...

Overclock: Overclocking the Intel® Celeron® D 326 Processor (64bit on the cheap)

Finally was able to load another homegrown article for the FanBoys. This time, it's for the lowest end budget overclockable chip from Chipzilla. The Intel® Celeron® D 326 is a monster oveclocker, and if you're really tight on a budget and would like to build a new rig based on LGA775, what you can probably do is get a great overclocking motherboard and then pair it up with this little monster. Overclock it, and once you have enough moolah, jump in to a newer processor. But hey, don't let the cheap price muddle your decision to get this chip, it's a treasure buried in the haystack when it come to reserve MHz ready for awakening!

Primarily geared on the value market, it is designed to deliver affordable computing. The Celeron D processors provide customers the capability to affordably get onto the Internet, utilize educational programs, home-office software and productivity applications with great computing and multimedia power. It has great features for digital home computing, such as support for EM64T to enable the system to address more than 4GB of system memory and advance security functionality thru Execute Disable Bit that can prevent certain classes of malicious "buffer overflow" attacks when combined with a supporting operating system.

Source:Overclocking the Intel® Celeron® D 326 Processor

Tech Link (Overclock): Intel Celeron D 336 Overclocking

I've done overclocking the Intel® Celeron® D before, and I'd say they really rock for their price and performance, for which they are intended to work with. The reviewer seems to agree with my conclusion before, even if they use a much higher end, but still equally affordable, Intel® Celeron® D 336.

There you have it, the first ever article on Legion Hardware to include an Intel Celeron processor. Unfortunately, Intel will only submit their high-end processors, as they refuse to produce Celeron processors for review. Given it had been quite some time since I last used a Celeron processor, I was interested to see how far they had come and whether the new Celeron D processors were worth considering. When building a budget system of any description it is hard to ignore a $70 US processor that can comfortably overclock to almost 3.6GHz and is 64-bit compliant.

Source:Legion Hardware

Review: Overclocking Celeron D 2.93Ghz

Another old article I posted over at TPC, this Celeron D 2.93Ghz is cool overclocking chip, what you would expect with a processor based on Prescott core.

_{All materials ©2005 by DM, reproduction by permission only
Target Audience: O/B (N=Newbie, E=Hardware Enthusiast, O=Overclocker, B=Budget)}

I. Introduction

The boxed Intel® Celeron® D processor based on Intel’s industry leading 90nm process technology is now with 256KB L2 cache and 533 MHz front side bus. An ideal solution for the value-minded PC buyer, the Celeron® D processor based platform can provide an affordable and reliable PC for the home or office. With proven technology from the leader in microprocessors, the Intel Celeron D processor is able to handle everything from the Internet to educational programs, making the Celeron D processor an ideal choice at an exceptional value. In this short article, I'll be playing with this budget CPU and give some feeling of the CPU's overclocking headroom

II. Test Setup and Benchmark Suites

Components:

• Processor: Celeron D 340 (2.9Ghz) with stock Cooler
• Motherboard: Abit AA8XE i925XE
• Memory: 2x256MB Corsair XMS2 PC4300@DDR400@CL4-4-4-12(SPD)
• Video Card: Inno3D GeForce 6600 128MB/128bit
• Hard Disk: Seagate 80GB SATA (ST380817AS)
• Optical Drive: Samsung CDRW Combo
• Floppy Drive: Sony 1.44Mb
• Chassis: Thermaltake LanParty
• Power Supply: Antec Neo2 480w

Benchmark/Stability Test Suite:

• SuperPi
• PCMark02
• PCMark04
• PCMark05
• Sandra
• Everest
• 3dmark01
• 3dmark03
• 3dmark05
• Aquamark03
• Doom3

<sub>Note0: The choice of motherboard is just out of random. I could have used my Asus P5AD2, P5WD2, or Abit AW8, but it was the motherboard that's already on the chassis so I might as well fire it up =)

Note1: Currently, there's no Celeron D that has 14x multiplier. On LGA775, the lowest multiplier currently available is 19x, while on S478, 16x is currelty listed.

Note2: As for the video card, this is the fastest that I have (as you can tell, am not a gamer). So if you have complaints about this card and would like to see high end 3DMark01/03/05 benchmark results, I am accepting donations ;)...</sub>

III. Test Results

Stock Settings

On with stock settings benching for baseline comparison before and after overclocking.

Subsystem Testing

A glimpse of how the CPU performs...

Sandra CPU Arithmetic

Sandra CPU Multimedia

Sandra RAM Bandwidth

Sandra Cache and Memory

PCMark2002

PCMark2004

PCMark2005

SuperPi 1M

Everest RAM

Gaming

Some results with commonly used gaming benchmarks...

3DMark01/03/05

Aqumark03

Doom3

Overclocking

No voltage is adjusted, just pushing the FSB. After a few minutes (actually, hours), I found the Max Rock/Full Stable Overclock of 169FSBx22 or a very healthy 3.718 Ghz. On with the comparison, to check whether it's a futile effort to overclock or if there is really any gain.

Subsystem Testing

A glimpse of how the CPU performs...

Sandra CPU Arithmetic

Sandra CPU Multimedia

Sandra RAM Bandwidth

Sandra Cache and Memory

PCMark2002

PCMark2004

PCMark2005

SuperPi 1M

Everest RAM

Gaming

Some results with commonly used gaming benchmarks...

3DMark01/03/05

Aqumark03

Doom3

Keep in mind that this is a relatively high-clocked processor, so lower clocked processor may, theoretically, give you more overclocking headroom. To check the ceiling of this particular processor, I'll push the FSB until I encountered stability issues. I will not tweak the vCore as well since I'm running on a stock heatsink. Finally, I'll play around with the multiplier, just to give a feel of how this CPU can perform on low multiplier and high FSB. So here are the results:

• Max Benchmark Stable Overclock:: = 182FSB (4.01Ghz) CPU-Z


• Tweaked Rock Stable Overclock:: = 266FSB x 14 (3.733) CPU-Z

I didn't include the benchmark results for the 266FSB x 14 results since, as mentioned earlier, there's no Celeron D currently available with such low multiplier. But suffice it to say that performance improvement can be felt. Here's one screenshot of SuperPi 1M with 266FSB.
However, with a x19, which is the lowest currently available, 180FSB to 190FSB is reachable, and if with a decent cooler and vCore adjustment, 200FSB is doable. At 200FSB, that is a very healthy 3.8Ghz Celeron D.

IV. Conclusion

The Celeron D on LGA775 is a monster overclocker, capable of hitting more than 3Ghz which. At this speed, there's a noticeable performance gain both in gaming and multimedia capabilities. Subjectively, I can feel that my browsing (yay) experience is faster, websites load much faster. If you're on a budget, or just transitioning and saving, the Celeron D can tide you over till your next killer rig arrives.

_{All materials ©2005 by DM, reproduction by permission only}