At under $200 there is no way
you can go wrong with the Celeron 300A. As long as you are willing to accept the
risks associated with overclocking, and have the confidence in your motherboard as well as
your $180 processor investment, the Celeron 300A can't be turned down. A standard
Celeron Cooler Master fan will be all you need to take advantage of the incredible
overclocking capabilities of the new Celeron's, just make sure that when ordering you are
placing an order for the correct item. There are two different 300MHz Celeron's, the
300A is the newest processor with the integrated 128KB of L2 cache. It looks like
once again, Intel has rained on AMD's parade after the lengthy battle between AMD's K6-2
and Intel's Celeron, the microprocessor giant seems to have emerged victorious for yet
another round. AMD's roadmap states that the K6-3 will be receiving a full 256KB of
L2 cache integrated into the die later this year, if AMD can pull that off then Intel may
have another reason to pursue a low cost chip such as the Celeron A, however until then,
if you're looking for a new processor to build your computer around nothing can beat the
Celeron A...toss in an ABIT BH6 into the combination and you've got one killer computer
for a few hundred bucks. For the first time in quite a while, kudos to Intel on a
job well done.
Intel Pentium II Celeron 300A processors provided courtesy of Azzo Computers and Treasure Chest Computers
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Hulk - Thursday, April 26, 2012 - link
I remember this review fondly. This was the review that prompted me to build my first computer. My 300a went to 450 just like almost every one.dananski - Tuesday, February 24, 2015 - link
This was sort of before my time (the day after my 11th birthday) but I wish I had known these things in such detail when I first came to buying and building computers. And I do miss Anand's excellent writing now he has left.Kepe - Sunday, March 1, 2015 - link
Hehe, the WR overclock for this processor was broken yesterday: 721 MHz. Amazing! :Dhttp://hwbot.org/hardware/processor/pentium_2_cele...
StrangerGuy - Monday, April 1, 2019 - link
I wasn't into PCs in 1998/99, but looking back there were countless people I know who got ripped off by buying the somewhat-to-insanely overpriced P2/P3s, or the cheap-but-slow K6 variants after the incredible Celly 300A hit the streets. I guess the Internet wasn't that mainstream then, let alone PC review websites like AT.It's funny now people spend big bucks elking out a mere 10% OC out of their i7/i9s, while 20 years ago overclocking the 300A by 50% on a 440BX is free in the truest sense of the word.
PandaBear - Monday, July 6, 2020 - link
Back then people expect performance doubling about every 18-24 months. These days you get 10% improvement every 18-24 months because of monopoly.Also other than GPU, SSD, and maybe up to 16GB of DDR4, there really isn't anything worth upgrading anymore.
bunnyfubbles - Tuesday, March 30, 2021 - link
these days we get 10% not because of monopoly (you could have made that argument after Sandy Bridge launch, but not now with AMD producing viable competition thanks to Zen) but because we're running into the physical limits of silicon. Hell, we knew even as far back as ~2006 that clock rate ramping would be unsustainable.