Budget CPU Upgrades: Intel's Celeron 766

Final Words

What should you take away from all of this?  For starters, the Celeron, now at 766MHz, is mainly an upgrade chip, since there is clearly a better option if you are building a new system from scratch.  For those of you that need us to spell it out, the Duron is obviously a much better alternative not to mention that, clock for clock, it is cheaper than the Celeron.  A Socket-A platform carries quite a bit of upgrade potential as you will be able to drop an Athlon in there later on, and if you pick up a DDR board or a motherboard with true 266MHz FSB support (based on the VIA KT133A chipset) you will be able to use future Athlons as well.

But let’s talk about where the Celeron 766 would fit, and where you would be better off sticking to an older Pentium III.  As we discovered, business/content creation applications do get a small boost courtesy of the Celeron’s clock speed.  Remember that at 766MHz, both of the Celeron’s caches are running at 766MHz as well.  For applications that can reside in the processor’s L2 cache, a 766MHz clock speed is definitely desirable. 

If you happen to own an older BX or even a LX based motherboard, with something slower than a Pentium III 500E (especially if you have an older Katmai Pentium III, without any on-die L2 cache), the Celeron makes perfect sense as an upgrade.  Again, provided that your usage patterns are best represented as a general purpose or home office/business user. 

Once you start getting above the Pentium III 500E level, the Celeron 766 begins to lose a lot of its appeal.  For those users, you’re probably better off either upgrading to another Pentium III or waiting until the 100MHz FSB Celerons come out and picking up one of them. 

Gamers will want to stay away from the Celeron 766 as it won’t be your best option at all.  The only gamer that will want to consider it will be the user that has a Pentium III 450, without any on-die L2 cache, and is looking for a marginal performance boost.  Even then, don’t expect too much out of the Celeron 766 as a great gamer’s CPU. 

In the end, we’re glad to see that the Celeron will be gaining a 100MHz FSB next year, it will give it more of a chance against the Duron, and although it will lose the performance battle, it will provide current BX motherboard owners a cheap upgrade path which is always a good thing.

What we would like to see on the AMD side is larger presence of the Duron processor in the retail market. The processor is such a good, high performing design, it is a shame that it is a well kept secret among hardware enthusiasts alone. Hopefully with a solid value platform to run on next year, the Duron will be able to provide system integrators and OEMs with exactly what they need as the keystone to a high performing sub $1000 system.