At 15:19 8/14/1999 , Drew Dunn wrote:
 >The most significant difference between a PII and a Celeron is that the
 >level 2 cache on a PII is four times larger than that of a Celeron, so
 >at a given clock speed a PII will outperform a Celeron on CPU intensive
 >operations.

But there's another difference! The cache in the PII runs at half
the CPU's clock speed whereas the cache in the Celeron runs at the
full speed of the CPU. The Celeron has faster cache!

A lot of the time, the smaller but faster cache in the Celeron will
perform just as well (or even better) as the larger but slower cache
in the Pentium II.

In my experience, CPU intensive tasks run slightly faster on a
Celeron whereas disk intensive tasks run slightly faster on a
Pentium II (if both Celeron and Pentium II are running at the
same speed). That's probably why most servers use the Pentium II
or Pentium III...and use SCSI drive systems.

For a desktop system, I would guess that you wouldn't notice the
difference between a PII-333 and a Celeron 333...or any other
speed Celeron/Pentium II.

By the way, Celerons now come as chips that fit in 370 pin sockets
whereas Pentium II and Pentium III CPUs still fit in slots (on
"Slot One" motherboards). You can buy a $15 or so "Slotket" adaptor
to allow a 370 pin Celeron to fit in a Slot One motherboard. Or you
can buy a motherboard with a 370 pin CPU socket...but such a
motherboard won't be able to take Slot One processors.

Drew already mentioned that Celerons run at 66 MHz FSB whereas
Pentium II processors 350 MHz or faster run at 100 MHz FSB.

Regards,
Bill

            Do you want to signoff PCBUILD or just change to
                    Digest mode - visit our web site:
                    http://nospin.com/pc/pcbuild.html