Multiprocessor Systems: Dual Celerons

Setting up the AnandTech test bed, the Epox Dual Processor BXB-S Intel 440BX based motherboard was used as the heart for the Dual and Single systems. A single 64MB Mosel Vitalic Memory Man SDRAM DIMM was installed in the first memory bank, then upgraded to 128MB, and in 128MB increments afterwards up to 512MB. The rest of the configuration was as follows:

• 9GB IBM Ultrastar Ultra Wide SCSI-3 HDD
• Matrox Millennium G200 (16MB) AGP Video Card
• Microsoft Windows NT Workstation 4.0 with Service Pack 4 Installed
• The latest device drivers as of March 18, 1999 were installed
• All tests were run at 1024 x 768 x 16-bit color at a 75Hz refresh rate

The performance of the Dual Celeron 450 solution managed to outdistance the competition by a large enough margin to make the relatively small time investment worth the while in all cases with the exception of Adobe Photoshop where the larger L2 cache of the Pentium II begins to shine over the smaller albeit faster 128KB on the Celeron.