Budget CPU Upgrades: Intel's Celeron 766

Under business applications, in spite of its crippling 66MHz FSB and memory bus, the Celeron 766 is still approximately 7% faster than a 500MHz Pentium III.  For business applications however, a 7% improvement is hardly worth an upgrade.  This illustrates a major theme of this review, which is our take on the age-old adage, don’t judge a book based on its clock speed. 

The two AMD solutions, in spite of being lower in price and lower clocked than the Celeron 766 that is available today, offer noticeably superior performance.  This is due to a number of factors, the 200MHz EV6 bus that both the Duron and the Athlon share as well as their more associative, larger, L2 caches. 

The 14% improvement carried by the lower clocked Duron over the Celeron is something that is most expected, and we have proved this countless times.  However, for the user that currently owns a BX, or even an LX board with proper BIOS support, the Celeron is a much more attractive option since you get rid of the cost of a new motherboard.

As we mentioned at the start of this review however, in the case of a user constructing a new system from scratch, the Duron is a much more attractive alternative.