Intel Celeron 700

The Celeron's Limitations

For a full investigation of exactly how much the Celeron's 66MHz FSB and its 66MHz memory bus limit the processor's performance take a look at our original Celeron "Coppermine128" Review. But for a brief recap of the conclusions we came to here are some quick comparisons of the effects of the 66MHz memory bus and FSB on the Celeron's performance:

As you can see there is a noticeable performance difference between running a Celeron with a 66MHz memory bus and running it with a 100MHz memory bus. The largest differences come up under Quake III and under SYSMark 2000 as well.

In order to measure the effects of the 66MHz FSB on the Celeron we were forced to disable the L2 cache of both a Pentium III and a Celeron and left them at equivalently clocks, the difference between the two being that the Celeron was using a higher multiplier and a 66MHz FSB while the Pentium III made use of a 100MHz FSB to reach the same frequency with a lower clock multiplier. While this did exaggerate the effects of the 66MHz memory bus in particular, it does help us to get our point across that it is a definite limitation of the Celeron.

Factoring in the 66MHz FSB into the equation leaves the Celeron even more penalized under SYSMark and Quake III Arena and it continues to feel the pain under the other tests as well.