Swiftech MC370 Socket-370 Peltier Cooler

The Test

The fate of the Celeron has already been determined. The 0.25-micron Mendocino core which the Celeron is based on seems to max out at around 600MHz. This doesn't mean that there won't be people that can hit 600MHz+ with their Celerons, but for the most part, 600MHz is the limit of the current process.

The MC370-1 and MC370-2 will definitely help you take your Celeron up to that 600MHz mark, although depending entirely on your specific CPU you may experience an overall success or failure with the coolers. Since we can't possibly tell everyone how their particular CPUs will do with the MC370-1 and 2, we have decided on picking two CPUs, one of a fairly good yield and one of a relatively bad yield and compared the temperatures to which the two coolers managed to cool the CPU down to in comparison to a decent heatsink/fan combo.

The temperature of the CPU was measured using the Celeron's on-die thermal diode which is read from courtesy of the Winbond 83267HF I/O controller that supports hardware monitoring of the thermal diode. The thermal diode has been present on all Intel CPUs since the Pentium II and is quite useful for obtaining the actual temperature your CPU core is running at. It is a much more accurate method of determining temperature than using an external thermistor.

Unfortunately, very few Socket-370 motherboards support reading from the on-die thermal diode directly. One of the only boards that supported this feature was the Gigabyte GA-6WMM7 which was used in our temperature tests below.

The temperature of the CPU was taken using Motherboard Monitor at the initial boot into Windows for the 'Cold Boot' tests and after a period of 100% CPU utilization using Distributed.net's RC5 client for Full load testing.