Tuesday, April 18, 2006

Intel Celeron M 3.0GHz Beats AMD Athlon 64 FX-60. Superior Overclocking Potential of 0.065micron Celeron M Processors

12:44 pm | Aleksey Razin

Mobile Yonah (Core Duo) processors overclocked in desktop mainboards have been considered capable of demonstrating the performance level we could expect from the upcoming desktop Conroe CPUs. Some time ago, we found out that this comparison cannot be regarded as absolutely relevant because Intel Core architecture is quite different from Core Duo architecture of Pentium M processors.

However, some hardware enthusiasts are still getting down to exciting Yonah overclocking experiments while waiting for the Conroe. Especially, since there are more and more desktop mainboards in the market that support mobile Core Duo and Pentium M CPUs and the price of these mainboards keeps dropping. A famous overclocker aka Coolaler posted some results of his overclocking experiment performed on a 0.065micron Celeron M version when this baby reached 2.6-3.0GHz core frequency in an AOpen i975Xa-YDG mainboard based on i975X chipset and equipped with a powerful air cooler. The results of the SuperPI benchmark are given in the table below:

I would like to stress that 21 seconds for PI calculation is a typical result for such CPUs as Core E6600 (2.4GHz) or dual-core Athlon 64 FX-60 overclocked to over 3.0GHz. I think you would agree that it is a more than impressive result for a CPU worth less than $150 – Celeron M 420 (1.6GHz). Its performance, as well as overclocking potential are truly remarkable here. I only wish that we didn’t have to hunt for specific $200-mainboards to be able to use this CPU in our desktop platforms.

Celeron M CPUs on 0.065micron Yonah core have already started selling. Celeron M 420 (1.6GHz) and Celeron M 430 (1.73GHz) are already available in Japanese and Hong-Kong retail stores. They are offered for $125 and $150 respectively. They feature a single core, 1MB L2 cache, support 533MHz bus. The Vcore equals 1.3V. These processors haven’t been officially announced yet.

• Coolaler.com web page

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