X-bit labs

Celeron E1200: Dual-Core Processor Almost for Free (page 4)

Category: CPU

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

[ 01/14/2008 | 05:11 PM ]

Overclocking

When we discuss Celeron processors, overclocking topic comes up immediately. Of course, on the one hand, these processors feature very low clock speeds, but on the other, they are based on the same semiconductor dies as the CPUs from the higher-end families.

To check out the overclocking potential of our Celeron E1200 engineering sample we put together a system based on Asus P5E mainboards (Intel X38 chipset). It was equipped with two modules of Corsair Dominator TWIN2X2048-10000C5DF DDR2 SDRAM and OCZ GeForce 8800GTX graphics card. The system also featured Western Digital WD1500AHFD hard disk drive. To dissipate the processor heat we used Zalman CNPS9700 LED air cooler.

First of all we decided to find out what would be the maximum frequency for our dual-core Celeron test processor at nominal voltage, which was in our case equal to 1.28V.

The CPU overclocked to 2.96GHz. The result is overall quite logical, considering that top processors on M0 core stepping feature clock frequencies of 2.6GHz.

The second overclocking experiment was performed with the processor Vcore increased to 1.5V.

In this case the CPU remained stable at 3.4GHz frequency. This is a typical and expected result, because the Core 2 Duo E4000 and Pentium E2000 processors based on the same core overclock to pretty much the same frequencies. As for the temperature, Celeron CPU working at this speed heated up to 64ºC under full workload.

Note that we overclocked our dual-core Celeron processor with 8x clock frequency multiplier. We chose this particular multiplier, because it is standard for the only Celeron E1200 model available in the today’s market. During this experiment the bus frequency was increased to 425MHz, which is not too high to hit against FSB Wall.

So, overclocking of dual-core Celeron E1200 processors may bring you doubling of their nominal clock speed, which is highly positive for its relative performance level. However, you shouldn’t forget that overclocking raises only clock and bus frequency, but doesn’t allow increasing the L2 cache memory. And it means that the advantage of overclocked dual-core Celeron processor over higher-end Intel CPUs is quite questionable at this point. Let’s find out what the real state of things is from our performance tests.