Budget CPU Upgrades: Intel's Celeron 766

New Benchmarks

To kick off the performance tests we have the first benchmark from Ziff Davis Media.  For those of you that may remember, the media giant CNet acquired ZDNet in a huge buyout, leaving the magazine portion of what used to be Ziff Davis all alone.  Acquired by a holding company, this magazine portion of what used to be Ziff Davis (responsible for PC Mag, etc…) is now operating under the name Ziff Davis Media.  With the cooperation of ZDBOP, now called eTesting Labs, they have produced a new set of 2001 benchmarks.

We had the opportunity to speak with a few representatives of Ziff Davis Media at this year’s Comdex and discussed with them our concerns over the future of benchmarking, especially with the recent fears surrounding BAPCo’s relationship to Intel and the impartiality of their benchmarks being jeopardized by that.  It is good to know that Ziff Davis Media completely understood our concerns and are looking to restore a bit of sanity to the benchmarking world. 

As you may or may not know, the old Ziff Davis Winstone benchmarks (Business & High End) used to be the de-facto benchmarking standards.  However the pace of hardware improvements has outlasted the benchmarks greatly, thus causing limitations in the benchmarks to surface and the numbers to begin to lose value.  Since December 20, 1999 we stopped using Business Winstone 99 because of this very reason, and switched over to Content Creation Winstone 2000.

Ziff Davis Media and eTesting Labs have brought back the next set of benchmarks, their 2001 suite.  Now focusing much more on “hot spot” operation (performing longer tasks at once, instead of constantly switching tasks like the old tests), the 2001 benchmarks should be much more accurate indicators of overall system performance. 

Without further ado, let’s see how these new benchmarks stack up.

Remember that we aren’t shooting for a clock for clock comparison, rather aiming to compare processors that fall around $100 in price, although some of these are a tad more than that figure.  Also remember that we are giving the Celeron 766 the benefit of the doubt and expecting its price to drop down to within a similar range shortly, so how does it perform?