Intel Celeron 600 "Coppermine128"

Conclusion

The new Celeron is definitely not the most impressive processor out there but then again it wasn't meant to be. The Celeron is and has always been aimed at the "Basic PC" market segment not at the performance market segment and especially not at the high-end market segment.

Considering the fact that the Celeron, as a 66MHz FSB part could still be used in an older LX motherboard provided that the manufacturer provided BIOS support for the chip, the CPU does an excellent job at offering good entry level performance at a not so high cost.

For those of you that are looking to pick up one of these new Celerons because of their sub-$200 price tag but are disappointed by the performance, your best bet is to pair up the new Celeron with a 133A motherboard and bump memory bus frequency up a notch to at least 100MHz.

If you happen to be a first generation Pentium III owner looking for an upgrade to a processor with a bit more kick, the Celeron is definitely not the way to go. Your 'old' Pentium III is a faster solution because of its 100MHz FSB frequency and thus you should only look towards the new Coppermine Pentium IIIs as a potential upgrade path or AMD's Athlon if you don't mind replacing your motherboard.

While we had expected the new Celeron to be an overclocking madman, it will take just a little bit longer for that dream to come true. We were only able to get our hands on a 600MHz sample which, because of its 9.0x clock multiplier would only be able to hit 900MHz when used with a 100MHz FSB setting. Although an overclock like this may be possible as yields improve, our sample wasn't able to do it. A Celeron at 900/100MHz would be just about as fast as a Pentium III at 900MHz in most situations, in spite of the smaller L2 cache. We will be publishing an Overclocking the Celeron guide shortly to describe the performance benefits associated with overclocking these new Celerons.

With AMD's Spitfire due out shortly the "Basic PC" market segment is about to get interesting, with the new Celerons being crippled by the 66MHz FSB/memory bus to the point where the older Pentium IIIs are faster than them, an AMD Spitfire with 128KB of L2 cache could easily take the performance crown from Intel in the low-end market. At the same time, there is nothing to say that the Spitfire isn't crippled in another way as well...