Intel Celeron 466

Perhaps more of a landmark than any other for overclockers and budget PCs was the Intel Celeron 300a. Found to overclock to 450MHz easily, and outperform a Pentium II 450 due to its full-speed cache, the Celeron quickly got a name as a good overclocking CPU. Intel continued its Celeron line, and moved from Slot 1 to the PGA370 architecture (sometimes referred to as PPGA, or PGA). The PGA370 architecture was pretty simple to understand for everyone, since it looked like a regular Pentium/Pentium MMX CPU. 370 pins to the grid, and a regular ZIFF socket that just snapped in with a lever. The Celeron speeds increased, all the way up to 433MHz. The 433MHz Celeron came in Slot 1 and PGA370 format, and that made folks happy to be able to pick which they wanted. Then Intel released todays review candidate, the Intel Celeron 466 - but only in PGA370 format. This was a smart marketing move, since most overclockers would want the Slot 1 format and use it on a 440BX motherboard. The 466 requires you to use a PGA370 capable motherboard, and for most owners who wanted to buy a nice Tyan motherboard or an Abit BX6, they were suddenly out of luck. This is when a company called MicroStar International started promoting the "MSI-6905 Rev 1.1". The 6905 was a Slot 1 converter card that allowed the Celeron 466 to plug into a Slot 1 motherboard. Suddenly, happiness and rejoice hit the PGA370 market. This leads us to todays review, the Celeron 466, and including the MSI-6905 in with it, as well as a good 64MB PC100 stick of ram.

You would think after seeing the 6905 that there would be a big pain-in-the-butt procedure for installation, since there were about 10 different jumpers and a cryptic manual that comes with it. We tried it the blind way, and just attached the Celeron 466 to the 6905 and put it in a trustworthy Abit BX6 Rev2.0. To our surprise, it worked. The CPU was detected as a Celeron 466, and Abit's bios was able to set the voltage correctly (after a BIOS flash that is). The 6905 also has an overclocking option to force the bus speed to 100Mhz, which should prove to be an interesting concept.

For overclocking we found the Celeron 466 samples to reach two different levels, 525MHz and 583MHz. Each CPU we tested was fitted with a Socket Sinker from 3DCOOL.COM for optimal temperatures, and tested for a few hours. The first CPU we tried worked great and stable at 583MHz, but the second wouldn't go stable above 525MHz. This goes to show that heat isn't the only factor limiting the CPUs, as the Celeron core is almost maxed. If you get over 583MHz with the 466 in any case, we would be quite surprised. The yields of the Celeron 466 are coming out pretty steady though, and 525MHz seems to be the keynote for over 2/3 of the Celeron 466s on the market today.

The Celeron 466 has an advantage over the Pentium III 450, and that's what the major comparison will be for today. The Celeron 466 is much cheaper, by roughly $100-$150 depending where you shop. Its advantages besides the discounted price, is that its 128Kb L2 cache runs at full clock speed, where the Pentium III 450s 512Kb L2 cache runs at only ½ clock speed. Even though the Pentium III 450 has more cache, its slowness makes it a slower processor than the Celeron 466 in most cases. The Pentium III 450 isn't that big of a hog though, as it supports its new instruction set (which most apps/games don't really support right now), but most importantly it has a 100Mhz front side bus (FSB). The 100MHz FSB is pretty important for performance, and the Celeron 466 is limited at 66MHz for its FSB, which is something to take into consideration. Despite the 44MHz decrease in FSB speed, the Celeron 466 outperformed the Pentium III 450 in almost all of our benchmarks.

Since the benchmarks leaned in the Celeron 466's favor for most of the benchmarks, we'll just summarize rather than indulge you with 5 pages of benchmark graphs to read. Every game we tested proved faster on the Celeron 466. This includes Quake II, Quake III Test (1.08), as well as Turok 2. The only place where the Celeron 466 lost in regards to gaming was in 3D Mark 99 MAX. Since 3D Mark uses the Pentium III SSE instructions, the Pentium III 450 had an advantage, and took the lead, however by a very small margin.

In applications, it was a tossup for the most part. It seems in all the apps the CPU isn't the limiting factor rather than the video card or hard drive being used. The Celeron 466 won about half of the time whereas the Pentium III won the other half. Not really a surprise there though, as re-running the benchmark would probably change the winners in some tests since the scores were so close.

If a budget PC is what you're after, or even a good gaming rig for a good price, then the Celeron 466 is more than likely a strong candidate for your PC. The upcoming Celeron 500MHz won't provide enough of a speed increase, but it will drive the Celeron 466 price down, making this an even more affordable and obvious choice. The MSI-6905 is the best PGA370 à Slot 1 converter card on the market. There is no way anything else beats it. You could spend a year tinkering with the options and tweaking your system with that alone. Since most games don't even support Intel's SSE instructions only found on the Pentium III processor, there's not really any reason to choose the Pentium III over the Celeron 466. The only way you would is if number crunching was all you do, or if you used the processor as a web server or something along those lines. The Celeron 466 is an excellent buy, and something that will be dropping in price rather soon as well.