Comment by runlevel1
18 days ago
Was that the period of time when you got more bang for your buck building a PC with dual-socket Celerons than one high-end Pentium?
EDIT: An excellent retrospective on it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UE-k4hYHIDE
Yes, the dual Celeron 300As, if you could take advantage of multiple cores, were faster than the higher end CPUs, particularly if you overclocked to 450MHz. My box was stable at 450MHz for around a year, then I had to gradually down-clock it, eventually back to 300. Never really did much to track down why that was, just rolled with it and figured I should be grateful for the overclocking I had.
I also ran a dual Celeron system overclocked to 450mhz - it was great value in 1999. Abit even launched a motherboard that let you run dual Celerons without modifying the processors, the legendary BP6:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABIT_BP6
This was first board to let you use unmodified Celerons, the "hack" to let dual CPUs work with those chips was performed at the motherboard level, no CPU pin modifications needed.
The real problem with this setup was that a vanilla Pentium 3 would run circles around the dual Celerons. I had my Celerons clocked to something ridiculous at one point like 600MHz and still could not beat the Pentium.
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About a year later, I got the P3-550 that overclocked to 733. Not quite as good of an overclock in terms of percentages, but I ran that machine for 5 years with no issues.
Did you pet you cpus at the end and say something like, “you had a good run boys but we best be putting you out to pasture.”
iirc those overclocks needed thermal paste to be reapplied, plus dust in case probably crushed airflow