Budget CPU Upgrades: Intel's Celeron 766

Content Creation Winstone 2001 is a much better benchmark to compare performance differences in, since the type of applications being run tend to be much more performance demanding than your casual set of business/office applications. 

Here we see that the clock speed advantage over the Pentium III 500E does appear to be giving the Celeron a decent advantage, 12% to be exact.  Before questioning why we even bothered including the Pentium III 500E as a comparison point wait until we take you through all of the benchmarks. 

It is clear though, that as a general purpose CPU, without any focus on gaming or professional level applications, the Celeron 766 could be a decent upgrade to an older Pentium III system. 

Again we see the Duron’s sheer dominance which is why we desperately want to see the Duron used in more retail systems. 

SYSMark 2000 takes a different approach to benchmarking than the two Winstone tests we just took you through.  Instead of focusing on multitasking, which we believe is how the majority of enthusiasts use their computers, SYSMark 2000 focuses on testing the performance of a single application without any task switching. 

Without any focus on task switching, the memory usage of the tests go down (keeping one program in memory is easier than keeping two or more) and thus the stress on the memory bus goes down as well.  This allows the Celeron to play catch-up to the Duron, decreasing its advantage to under 9%, and its SSE optimizations aid its performance as well. 

The Pentium III 500E is also closing in on the Celeron 766, trailing by only 6% this time around.  This will be the last time that the Pentium III 500 loses to the Celeron 766, at least for the next few pages.  Surprised?  We told you there was a reason for including such a “slow” processor in this comparison.