Celeron 300A was also my first PC build I ever did on my own. I overlooked it to 464 mhz and it had very similar performance to my friends P2 450mhz. I threw in a 3dfx Banshee and ran everything I wanted.
This was me too, was still in school. Had a Riva TNT 2, most expensive part of the build was the 4.3gb hhd. Probably the computer I remembered best. Nothing would ever OC like this again, took 3sec. no cooling upgrades needed. A year later GTA3 came out, and it was unplayable. With my first paycheck I build an Athlon system for GTA 3.
exactly .. this celeron was best value for money those days . i remember i had to tape or paint a pin in processors board to unlock the frequency multiplier
I had a Celeron 333A which was able to run stable at 500Mhz (with 2.2V Vcore) It was a HELL of a CPU back then, in a lot of cases faster than any Pentium 2 model
It was best Intel CPU. I had 300MHz, added second cooler and switched to 450MHz by jumper settings on mainbord, It served couple of years and was a beast paired with RivaTNT at the time. Faster than more expensive Pentium II it was the best CPU in terms price/performance I ever bought, I had amd K6 II 266 before and no comparison.
@@pumabuciewska3729 the few ones that could run stable at 550mhz were the holy grail of the celeron line up. i considered myself very lucky with 333 @ 500, since most celerons would not surpass 450
I've been upgrading PCs since 386 DX 40 MHz, but to this day, across over 30 years, the Celeron 266 MHz remains the best value and best upgrade I ever did. It instantly (Day One) overclocked to a stable 448 MHz and powered 3 different GFX cards (while I had it). It's hard to believe, but I kept it for about 18-24 months !!! I could play Heretic II at 1024x768, which was a very respectable resolution back then. If I recall correctly, I upgraded from the 100 MHz Pentium 1, so this was quite an upgrade, basically a game changer (almost identical to buying very first 3DFX Voodoo 4 MB card). I think I eventually had GeForce II Ti in the same box. There was no way in hell that at the then-current prices, non-Celeron CPUs made any sense. The performance differential in games was abysmall, yet for a very significant price hike. By the time full-blown Pentium IIs actually dropped in price, there was Athlon/Duron at 750 MHz and then Pentium II made no sense. It was skipped by everyone I know. Only corporations bought full price PIIs, not sane gamers. Thus, I disagree extremely strongly with the vid's statement that "this CPU is not recommended!" That's laughable. Everyone I knew upgraded to these puppies, because anything else meant throwing money out the window. To this day, we all agree, that in history of gaming, there was only one such CPU - and that's this particular Celeron at 266 MHz. It's a historical CPU for a reason, but I guess if one didn't experience it, he can't know....
Like! Considering that practically all Celeron Covington 266 and 300 mhz where able to run at FSB 100 (400 and 450 mhz) they were still nice budget CPUs at that time in early 1998. But they became obsolete really fast just a few months later when the Celeron Mendocino was released.
I recall hearing those Celerons were capable of serious overclocking. Would love to see a video where one is pushed to its limit, mainly to see if it could be made into something usable. No doubt an actual PII would outclass it in spades, but it would still make for an interesting video!
A Celeron 300A overclocked to 450 is as fast as a PII 450, due to the PII having it's larger 512K cache on the processor card and running at half-clock whereas the Celeron's 128K cache is on-die and running at full clock
@foxyloon everything I have read indicates performance was equal to a real PII 450 also there is a vid on UA-cam of a piii pii and celery at 450mhz and performance is identical.
When I was active building computers during the 98-99 timeframe, the biggest seller (November/December 1999) was an overclocked Celeron with a whopping 512mb of ram with a geforce 256 video card.
I had Celeron 266 OC'ed to 448 MHz. Full PII did not make any sense from gamer's standpoint. It was much better to use that money for GFX card. I dont' recall if I started with Riva TNT1 in this box, but eventually ended up with GeForce 2 Ti with some in-between card after TNT2 Ultra (which was a really nice card for this CPU - instant framerate boost). I was watching CPU prices weekly and by the time full PII dropped to a price where it made sense to buy, it was already seriously outclassed by Athlon/Durons, so it didn't make sense to buy PII (again). But, if you were lighting cigars with $100 bills, I suppose it might have made some sense to buy PII at that time... I have never ever managed to replicate the framerate boost from upgrade in the decades that followed that compared to this Celeron. And I bought brand new box 2 months ago, but it's barely "Meh" compared to this Celeron...
My dad used to have the better Celeron 300A, mixed with a TNT 2 Pro, installed with Windows ME (he apparently know how to make it not crap) . I think he built it back in early 2000's - he didnt really have that much money for the latest stuff - the desktop appeared to be good enough playing MohAA, the original Call of Duty, No One Lives Forever, and other stuff that god knows what he played.... He unfortunately sold it back in 2007. Wish he had kept it.
@@patsy02 Havent asked him out yet, but well lets say it def way lower than even entry level oem PCs at that time. Oh, also he didnt use Sound Blaster cards. To him back in its heyday it was too much hassle to deal with.
Amd k2 3d now can be found cheaply but you will need a 400mgz+ to compete with intel 300 .- but for Windows ME- the os have Internet exporer 5 or assume 6.0 later which wont run good or fast on earlier cpus - So a Duron cpu will run games fine and browsers -but even a game as unrael tournament 2004 minimum are a tnt2 and 733mgz amd - I had one and could play 320x200 software mode (900 mghz cpu)- tnt2 could do open gl much better than directx and play the orginal game Unreal Tournament from 1999 in 1024x768
@@494ihi idk dude, my dad loves ME for the fact that it has native USB support. Also he told me that Windows 2000 can also crash if u're using old PCs too. I think he indeed aimed for AMD Thunderbird but dont have the money for it.
@@linkfreeman1998 One can still buy unused Barthon xp cpu's to this day , even thorthon ( gets warm) and throughbreed -all further different versions or thunderbird with different cache size and bus speed + a speed increase to 2200 (the 3200+ xp barthon)
Thanks for this video! I used this CPU in the computer I built for myself to take to my first year of college in 1998. I recently found the Computer Shopper catalog where I spec'd it out from. The CPU seemed amazing to me at the time coming from an AMD 5x86 133. Really appreciate your videos and looking forward to your Patreon launch.
Interesting! Nice knowing what to expect from these slow parts as well. This is actually very close to the PC I'm reviewing currently, a Premio with a PII 300. Thanks for another one Phil.
Before even watching, those were practically cacheless Pentium IIs. What a brilliant idea.. well, Celeron 300A fixed all that negative reputation these got.
The A-series didn't just fix the negative reputation, the fact they got full-speed cache put them on par with the full-blooded Pentium II. Not to mention they were overclockable to high heaven.
@@omegarugal9283 Yup... I remember the benchmarks were pretty much on-par with Pentium II's of the same clock frequency. I never had any issues with mine.
This era was my entrance to PC gaming. My parents bought a pentium II 350mhz gateway 2000 in 1998 when I was 6. I played Incoming on it along with Unreal, Age or empires II and many others. Lots of happy memories. I was not quite old enough to fully appreciate all the hardware though and was oblivious to the existence of the celeron at the time.
It had cache. But it was level 1 on-die cache only. The whole reason for Slot 1 was to hold a CPU and outboard level 2 cache on separate chips. The Celeron lacked the level 2 cache to save money. And because there was no need for the card, Intel went back to sockets. The PIII had faster L2 cache on the same die.
I remember at the time a friend had a new pre-built computer with a Slot A Celeron, Voodoo2 and a ViewMaster 15" CRT. I was quite jealous of it! At the time I had a K6 266 had just got one of the 'new' i740 cards from a local computer shop to replace the Diamond Stealth 3D 2000.. It was a decent upgrade, but not a match for the Celery. Later that year I would get a K6-2 300 for the Shuttle HOT-591P motherboard, and was much happier, lasting till I got one my favourite processors, a Duron 800 paired with a MSI K7T Turbo.
Would be nice to see a benchmark video with the Celeron Covington and Mendocino against their biggest rival, the AMD K6-2, preferably with a 3dfx card - Voodoo 2 or Banshee. The K6-2 performs best with 3dfx cards and worse with nvidia ati etc.
Even with L2 cache, the celerons are very overclockable. I have a few of them - Celeron 300A (SL2WM): 472 MHz @ 2.2V - Celeron 333 (engineering sample): 500 MHz @ 2.0v - Celeron 366 (SL36C): 550 MHz @ 2.0V Imagine having a celeron 333 overclocked to 500 MHz in 1998... It can beat the most powerful pentium II money can buy
that was because celeron a had on-die 128kb cache. rather than pentium ii style 512kb external cache. External cache modules could never overclock as good as on die caches.
I had one of these in my first PC as a kid, alongside a Matrox Mystique. Truly an elite gaming machine :D I do remember it being upgraded to an ATI Rage of some description a bit later, transparency actually working properly was quite the revelation.
Celeron 300A and an Abit BH6 motherboard was the right stuff during this era 🥰🥰 I also had a Banshee as a GPU, and man, that Incoming Forces game ran smooth as a fart slipping on a frozen lake 😁
Had a Celeron 266 clocked to 448 MHz and later a 366 clocked to 550 MHz coupled with a Voodoo3 2000. Worked like a charm, wish I hadnt sold it back in the days😅
If I recall correctly, that L2-Cache wasn't removed exactly but rather not added - the entire SLOT design of the Pentium 2 line ( including Celeron ) came to be because they had trouble adding decent cache to the CPU and required an external solution for it. The same holds true for AMDs Slot-A, and both companies switched back to common sockets as soon as possible due to the stop-gap solution it was.
Cache is most definitely important - learned this in the 1990s because my families Compaq Presario 4160 had NO L2 Cache at all, not even the COASt module slot. It was a S L U G. It was a Pentium 150MHz that I secretly overclocked a bit to 166Mhz by moving the bust speed select jumper from 60 to 66MHz. I managed to beg, borrow, and steal it up from the original 24MB of RAM up to 72MB at least. Even after that I specifically remember that the computers at school - some 100MHz and 120/133 were noticeably quicker and more responsive than the Presario. It was a hateful, slow, ugly slug of a machine.
One of the best things I ever did for one of my old boxes was swap the original C400 for a P3-500. Night and day. Used to always be standard for vidcard to go in the top slot, sound card in the middle, and and modem in the bottom slot, because of the interrupt problem. I still arrange things that way and never have a problem!
The only Celeron I had back in the day was a 366MHz, oh and there were two of them in the legendary BP6 mb o/c running at 550 MHz and 100MHz bus. It was awesome! Each cpu had a dual stack fan. Still wonder what a modern heat piped cooler would do to squeeze more out of the platform. Thanks for the video Phil. Good content as always. I remember Incoming coming with my wife’s Compaq, a K62 with ATI rage and Aureal on board. Looked and sounded great!
Good day when Phil uploads! Hoping for the day I can upgrade my Celeron 420 machine. With the specs it got, even Dungeon Siege (I totally recommend the game, by the way) runs great, just with stutters when new assets load in since I'm relying too much on the pagefile. That game was made for Windows XP, it even came with a Windows Media Player visualizer. For fighting games, if you want to cover them on the channel, there's a Killer Instinct 1 and 2 port for PCs running DirectX 7 and 9 called KIxxx Split, you'd need hard drive images from the OG XBOX versions of the games or find them online, but I can attest they run marvellously well. Also give a shot to the Full Tilt! series, where the pinball game from Windows XP came from originally, there's 2 other tables included.
It's cool to read the comments, everyone is reminecent of the 300A and the awesome games they played on it. I still have the original build that my brother put together, Abit AB-BH6 motherboard with a Celeron 300A, Aureal Vortex A3D soundcard. Only the video card was replaced because it was a crappy Intel i740 to a Riva TNT2, some RAM sticks died along the way and I had to replace the PSU but it's basically the same machine since 1998-99. I love it!
Time is the issue. Adding another CPU tons video, suddenly you have to build a second machine, different drivers and everything takes double the time. That's the main reason I don't do comparisons much and focus more on the "story" of a component.
Awesome! The slot one was my first pc. Bought it from a junk reseller in 2002. After coming off a 133mhz Pentium. This thing was night and day to me. It could actually play AVI files at full speed! And this was also in the dawn of the torrenting era, So I mostly used my pc to watch fansubbed anime. And Burn dreamcast games.
The Celeron was for overclocking . Everyone forgets how expensive Intel used to be and at that point the only other options were K6-2's . The first Celeron I had on a Tyan motherboard was a 433mhz clocked to 588mhz if I remember right until I got a p3 750mhz
@@eboethrasher I had the K6-2 first the 333mhz and then the the 500mhz . I couldn't get the k6-3 475mhz because I was broke when they were finally released.
Back on the days every enthusiast had a solution for lack of the cache. Just change FSB to 100-112MHz and you are back in the game. You benefit of higher CPU clock and higher menory clock in one time.
A celeron 300A win an ASUS P2B waas my rig at the time. The extra 128K on-chip cache and easy overclock to 450mhz made it a PII killer. It easily fulfilled all my needs until around 2001 when I could no longer ignore the appeal of the Athlon.
Our 1st PC was a Celeron2 366MhZ, RivaTNT 32MB, 128 MB SDRAM. This PC was used to run Age of Empires 2, NFS Hot Pursuit, Commandos1-2, Hitman, Medal of Honor, and it was capable to run GTA3 by using only top view :D The machine held up 3,5 years when the evolving of computers was exponential. It is now kept well packaged with all of its vintage peripherials in a locker room :D
The last time I used a Celeron processor was on a Skylake motherboard with an NVME SSD and 16GB of RAM. For normal tasks like web browsing and running Microsoft Office, it was completely fine.
Happy Friday Phil! My son and I were rolling when you said “yeah, both sides are messed up.” Thanks Phil. I remember the backlash when this Celeron came out. It was definitely a setback for Intel at the time.
@@philscomputerlab I remember working in the factory when these were made. Not sure what they were thinking but I wasn’t impressed. The Pentium II and III lines were pretty exciting back in my early days there and I have fond memories of being a part of that. So much has changed since then. I see the late 90s and early 2000s as sort of a golden era of technology growth in computing. Now it just doesn’t seem to have the same feeling when AMD and Intel come out with new CPUs, and I think the technology leaps are so much smaller vs. back then. Perhaps that’s why it just doesn’t feel as exciting as it did back then when new CPUs or GPUs came out.
@@mesterak I agree with you! The Gigahertz race was amazing. Technology progressed and it was exciting reading reviews on Anandtech and Tom's hardware. Now it's minimal improvements or products out of reach like RTX 4090...
Great episode! I had a Soundblaster Live back then and i remember waht a grate and clear sound it had. "Incoming" looks really great andf fun! Didn't know the game!
I think I had this processor after a Pentium 133Mhz, however, I don't remember now, what was my next processor. 23-24 years makes its toll on memories.
The one thing I liked about Supreme Commander over Total Annihilation is that I believe the lore specifically states that all the military units in Supreme Commander, aside from the Commander, were robots and so I felt a whole lot less terrible for sending waves upon waves to their destruction.
The original Slot 1 Celeron may have been a dog, but the Socket 370 300A that followed shortly was able to be overclocked by 50%. At the time, my best workstation (a Compaq Professional Workstation) had two 450 MHz PII CPUs, as did most of the ProLiant machines in our data center. A 300 MHz 300A overclocked to 450 MHz came pretty close in performance. At the time there was a motherboard that had two sockets for the 300A. Combined with an inexpensive 100 MHz HiPoint ATA RAID controller, it came quite close to the Compaq with fast wide SCSI II RAID, for a fraction of the Compaq's cost. Yes, I had one...of each. Back then, SETI@Home was the big thing in distributed computing. And with my twin twin 450 MHz powerhouses, I quickly became a top producer for the project. Then somebody installed the SETI@Home client on hundreds of desktop machines where he worked, and took the lead with stolen CPU cycles. At the time I had access to not hundreds, but thousands of machines. But they were at a hospital, and I wasn't about to put lives at stake out of competitiveness.
@@SergiuszRoszczyk it was a loophole that Intel quickly closed. SMP on Intel started with the Pentium Pro, and with it the main restriction was the 66 MHz bus that all CPUs shared. With the Pentium II, regular packages were able to do 2-way SMP, and the new Xeon was required for SMP beyond that. Cache and bus speed were crucial to SMP efficiency, and IME the four and 8-way PII SMP machines couldn't deliver those cores as well as multiple 2-way SMP machines could at a fraction of the price. The first Celeron was nothing but a PII SERR package without the L2 cache chip. No doubt Intel just assumed that nobody in their right mind would use one for SMP, and they were correct, mostly. The first Celeron was a dog. And it needed the Slot 1 interface, while other low-end CPU products used Socket 7. While the BX chipset was great, budget-minded builders could save a lot of money just upgrading a Socket 7 board. Clearly it wasn't worth Intel's time to disable SMP in the first Celerons because the CPU itself was a standard PII part. The Mendocino Celerons were different, with a tiny L2 cache on the CPU chip to make the new motherboard worth the added cost. Intel could have disabled SMP on this, but I suspect that they saw the free publicity that the ABIT BP6 dual-Celeron Socket 370 motherboard brought as worth the risk. When the Coppermine CPU chips came out, SMP was disabled, not just for the Celeron models, but for the PIII ones as well. To get SMP, you had to buy a Xeon, and even then were limited to 2-way. AMD ate Intel's lunch because of that deficiency.
I actually got a PC second hand many many years ago with this exact processor. Had a banshee in it but previous owner didn't have the drivers because CS would only launch in software mode. 64MB of ram and win 98. Was slow at running an awful lot of things and unfortunately didn't bother trying older dos stuff.
I over clocked my Celeron A to 400 mhz on Octeck mother board were all purchased from their sales point in Sydney ,N.S.W Australia.Also bought a Voodoo 2 of them and running windows 98 second edition. Great combo never any problems.
color keying (Chroma Keying) is removing a certain color from a palette. Commonly used in green screens back in the day to remove the green and add a background. I am going to guess that the 16 Bit render mode of the older cards fits with the games 16-Bit color palette while the GeForce cards did 32 Bit color so it would be off. Yes, I realize the Geforce cards did both 16 and 32 bit in the beginning but 16 bit mode was a subset of the 32 bit mode. That alone would throw the colors off and textures rendered in said color would be off as well.
Back in 1998 I was 2nd year of high school and my grandfather used the money he had been putting away for years for my education, toward buying a PC to help me with getting computer skill etc. I remember that the CPU mounting in Slot 1 socket was so wobbly, I had to improvise and used some fly line. I attached it to the CPU's radiator and tied the other end to the top frame of the case, precisely adjusting the fly line's length and tightness, so that the processor is placed perfectly horizontally :-) Good years!
Thank god that Intel released the Celeron 300A, 2 months after the 300 and for $10 less MSRP, which added L2 and was as a Overclocking powerhouse, that brought overclocking to the mainstream. I miss mine.
Intel cut too much with its first Celeron releases and not enough with its later releases under the same branding. No L2 cache hurt way too much. The cut-down yet faster than Pentium-II L2 cache on later models made Celerons easy to overclock and really challenge Pentium-2's performance-wise clock for clock. That was a real win for consumers and not Intel. People who got their hands on a Celeron 300A and overclocked it can really relate to this.
I used and tried the Celeron and PII back in the day and always find the PII more potent, and Yes I know the Celeron can overclock but so does the PII, I always overclocked the Bus with a PII and it would always beat the Celerons. I was using a PII 333 overclocked from 66 to 100 Bus which made it run at 400Mhz and it was tons of performance back then, you did not even need adjusted voltages or anything. just up the Bus and you were good to go. Still have all my stuff today, but since long in the same computer I did all this I have a PIII 550 and it is a Dos and 98 BEAST!
Ever try BattleZone II? It's one of my favorite retro games - its an interesting mix of first person vehicle combat and RTS. Definitely worth a look if you aren't familiar with it. I played it for the first time on my first compute a 500mhz HP Celeron system.
I remember this! I only saw its benchmark in a (printed) magazine and I was outraged as how anyone would give money for this. Its numbers from your benchmarks and others I could find on the internet now, don't look too bad on the average - but they cannot show what I always saw as the bane of Celeron processors, and especially this one: the stuttering, and how everything suddenly falls apart when there are "too many" things to handle at the same time. Although your TA gameplay gives a hint of that.
My very first computer was actually an Acer laptop powered by an Intel celeron clocked at 400mhz. It had 64mb of RAM, a 40gb HDD and 2mb of vram but no direct 3d. I only played games that supported software render. Midtown madness came installed on it. My father got it from a guy who worked at the airport's carry-on check point back 1999. Great memories! Cleaning and fixing that laptop it's how I became a technician. For me Celeron is the best 😅
My first "modern" family PC had a 400 or 433Mhz Celeron, 96mb of RAM and some onboard/integrated ATI Rage graphics and it ran TA like a champ, though, it'd struggle if you overrided the unit cap, load up huge maps, or cranked up the resolution too much. In your setup, I'd wager that it's some combination of the resolution and the lack of L2 cache on that Celeron that's causing the performance to stutter around. Otherwise, TA ran great on a lot of low power hardware of this era and beyond.
The original Celeron 266 & 300 were pretty bad due to the complete lack of L2 cache. However, since there was no L2 present they were great over clockers (much like the "A" versions that came after them) and bumping the FSB up to 100+ MHz helped negate some of the penalty of no L2. In the end we all remember the "A" versions of the Celeron due to their awesome overclocking ability and how having even 128KB of L2 running at full CPU speed made a MASSIVE difference in performance. I had the legendary Celeron 300A in an Abit BH6 mainboard that ran at 464 Mhz (4.5 * 103 MHz FSB) for a number of years. Later on I upgraded to a Socket 370 Celeron 566A in a Asus P3V4X mainboard with the help of a slotket adapter. That CPU ran at 875 MHz for a couple of years (8.5 * 103 MHz FSB) The L2 equipped Celerons were good CPUs for the money!
I got Incoming as a pack-in with my Creative Labs 3D Blaster Voodoo 2, along with... I wanna say Actua Soccer 2? or 3? Can't say I played it all that much...
The Celeron at 300 MHz was bad, disrespectful to any user, but it did not behave as horrible as many expected. It is important to take into account the major competition at that time: the AMD K6-2. Even with a 100MHz bus, the K6-2 was struggling to cope with integer arithmetic's, while it shine in the few 3DNow! optimized games. The K6 architecture did not incorporate an L2 cache until the + and K6-3 lineup, that was way too costly and came too late to change enough. In this competition, the Celeron fared quite decently as it had a much more modern FPU and microarchitecture, being based on the Pentium 2 architecture. In short, where it would really matter, particularly in games, the Pentium 2 microarchitecture and the solid performance of the 440BX chipset motherboards made the Celeron a very powerful performer. There was no match between it and the aging Super Socket 7 architecture AMD coped with on the low end. In the end, it should not be forgotten that the Celeron had another ace up its sleeve, the incredible overclocking potential. This made even the non-revised Celeron a dirt-cheap CPU with an incredible potential. The revised Celeron 300A, that also included an L2 cache, completely blown the competition, showing the biggest comeback in the low-end for Intel. AMD could not immediately respond with a cost-cut Duron which meant that Intel won valuable marketshare right after they started slowly lost it. Of course, Intel had massive support from OEM's. They could not have pulled such a victory as easily in other circumstances and they never had such an achievement ever since.
The k6 did fine at integer math where it fell on it's face was floating point performance. It was very fast at general use tasks at the time but in gaming especially games that relied on heavy floating point math would massively underperform. the k6-2 and later models improved FP math and introduced 3DNow technology to address the floating point deficiency even further there's even a version of Quake 2 that takes advantage of it and it actually performed really well at the time.
@@bdhale34 Even at integer performance, the K6 was outdated compared with a Pentium II and, by extension, a Celeron based on the same architecture. I agree that the FPU was the much more important issue and the main reason why AMD K6-2 had 3DNow!, as it had a much improved performance for floating point mathematics. The K6-3 and K6-2+ only added an integrated L2 cache but left the rest of the architecture unused. The major turnaround AMD had was with the Athlon. This revolutionary architecture was finally competitive with the Pentium III. With 3DNow! there was a multifaceted problem: you had to optimize drivers, which 3dfx did quite well but other manufacturers were not as interested, and you also had to optimize applications. Few programs were truly optimized for 3DNow!, but I agree that Quake 2 was a very good example.
For those posting do not confuse the Celeron 300 (Covington) w/ no L2 (That Phil is reviewing) with the Celeron 300A (Mendocino) that had L2, which was an overclocker's dream. Covington = Bad / Mendocino = Good
Well, the CPU is meant as an Office machine. Win98 or NT4 running MSOffice, Outlook and maybe some custom application someone threw together in VB6. This could make a nice DOS machine tough if you already have it lying around, just needs a proper ISA sound card of course. ;)
my first experience of incoming was on the sega dreamcast which i might add is a very faithful port . its actually the best option to run on windows 10 and newer due to those forced updates that keep rebreaking the pc version
You probably ran Total Annihilation at a too high resolution, this game does not support 3D acceleration so everything is on the CPU. 1080p 3D software rendering might be a little too much for a cache less Celeron, hence the slideshow. It could run better than this on a mere P200 if you stuck to 800*600 or 1024*768 at most.
My thoughts exactly. No-one played the game above 1600x1200 back when the game and the CPU were in their prime, hell, hardly anyone went above 1024x768, so we shouldn’t expect miracles in that area.
In my very old days, i had a celeron A with 333 MHz, paired with a GeForce 256 card and two voodoo 2 cards - paid and built by myself, except the CPU which i got for free, due to great results in a IT internship. I had this system for many years and was very happy with it. For most cases, the geforce card was much faster than both voodoo 2 cards, but i could play all glide based games without any problems in 1024x768. Interestingly, i recently started a video series, that gets me back into my PC childhood, playing retro games and recreating my very first systems i had with the software PCem - and, the celeron is the very last system i had which works very well on PCem.
@@MarcoGPUtuber I did. It doesn’t always work though. And I don’t always see the notification as soon as it drops anyway. I’m not really into needing to watch a video right at launch. It’s just as good to watch some of the older videos that are several years old. Most of Phil’s videos have held up well.
USB really is a struggle in Windows 98SE. To install any device, you have to click through the dialog boxes, but paradoxically you can't use a USB mouse until you click through those boxes. If you have a USB keyboard AND mouse and forgot to plug in a PS/2 device, you just have to force the machine off. It's really unintuitive. Oh and yeah, USB IRQs want to conflict with EVERYTHING. It's a hassle.
If you were to set the fsb to 100mhz this beast will run at 400mhz, the fact they didn't have a cache made them great cheap overclockers, would be cool to add that in with your comparison with a Pentium 2 when you upgrade later
Yeah, but don't forget to include screenshot of then-current prices and a link to Tom's HW benchmark explicitly mentioning how much you'll pay for a tiny performance increase coming from real PII. And how much more performance you would get if spent the same money on gfx card :)
12:55 Vamps for days! Also, I own multiple copies of TA. I did find a tor version as well, that's optimized and runs much better on older systems. The game had a lot of math issues, also 5000 unit cap is AWESOME!
If your board can run this it'll run a P2 , and a P3 Katmai , almost certainly . So why would you. Asides from overclocking the bejesus out of it just because you can , but then a 66mhz bus P2 is still going to o/c the same . Stripping the L2 cache was just such a cheap move. I have about 90% of the slot 1 P2 and P3s at my disposal , not a single Celery. Nice video, as always , Phil.
TA is my absolute most favourite game and I have played it a *hell* of a lot, even on modern machines when there is a LOT of action the game sometimes skips playing some sounds. I think it's just a limitation of the game itself. I can't remember right now if the modern patches run on Windows 98 but if they do, they allow you to play the CD audio by having it in the game folder as MP3s ;)
I'm a little bit disappointed that you seem to not have an A3D-Soundcard on hand for specific games 😜 ... But maybe that's an idea for a future project? About the Celeron, I remember having had lots of fun with my 300A @450MHz, I think I ran it with a Voodoo 3 3000 first and then with a Geforce 2 MX. Crazy times with frequent hardware upgrades ...
I wonder how this compares to some super socket 7 stuff like the K6-2s at similar clock speeds as while the celeron was late, it might have been a lot of peoples introduction into a platform with an upgrade path over dying sockets, imagine going from such a processor to a PII 450, PIII 1000, could take you through some video cards and memory/storage upgrades, my pentium III 550mhz has been waiting since i picked it up as a kid at a car boot sale to go into a system with the Riva TNT2 Ultra :P
I remember when these were released and laughing at them. Then they released the 300A and I never saw one that wouldnt run at 464Mhz. What a differnece between models.
Low FSB-speeds killed even faster Celerons back then. 100MHz was not enough to compete with Pentium3 EB-models w/ 133MHz FSB. Not even close. We actually tested that Pentium3 800/133 was about 15-20% faster than Celeron 850/100 with many games with same GPU.
I'm with ya on easy or very normal difficulties in games, they are meant to be fun! Only Celeron I've owned was the 533mhz but that had L2 cache and ran games in windows 98 fine, think I upgraded to an Athlon XP relatively quickly when I migrated to Windows XP though.
The Celeron 300A was one of the first systems I built with my own money... nothing like a free and EZ overclock to 450Mhz!
Celeron 300A was also my first PC build I ever did on my own. I overlooked it to 464 mhz and it had very similar performance to my friends P2 450mhz. I threw in a 3dfx Banshee and ran everything I wanted.
I actually have a 300A in my drawer next to my bed. Lol
This was me too, was still in school. Had a Riva TNT 2, most expensive part of the build was the 4.3gb hhd. Probably the computer I remembered best. Nothing would ever OC like this again, took 3sec. no cooling upgrades needed. A year later GTA3 came out, and it was unplayable. With my first paycheck I build an Athlon system for GTA 3.
Same boat here except for a 333a overclocked to 500. Awesome with a Geforce2mx back then
exactly .. this celeron was best value for money those days . i remember i had to tape or paint a pin in processors board to unlock the frequency multiplier
I had a Celeron 333A which was able to run stable at 500Mhz (with 2.2V Vcore)
It was a HELL of a CPU back then, in a lot of cases faster than any Pentium 2 model
I still have a socket 370 Celeron 500 CPU. No board or other hardware to use it but it's a start if i ever wanted to make a decent dos/98 machine.
It was best Intel CPU. I had 300MHz, added second cooler and switched to 450MHz by jumper settings on mainbord, It served couple of years and was a beast paired with RivaTNT at the time. Faster than more expensive Pentium II it was the best CPU in terms price/performance I ever bought, I had amd K6 II 266 before and no comparison.
Some Celeron's 366MHz run with 100MHz base, running as 550MHz. I have one, selected when I working in computer shop in service.
@@pumabuciewska3729 the few ones that could run stable at 550mhz were the holy grail of the celeron line up.
i considered myself very lucky with 333 @ 500, since most celerons would not surpass 450
I've been upgrading PCs since 386 DX 40 MHz, but to this day, across over 30 years, the Celeron 266 MHz remains the best value and best upgrade I ever did. It instantly (Day One) overclocked to a stable 448 MHz and powered 3 different GFX cards (while I had it). It's hard to believe, but I kept it for about 18-24 months !!! I could play Heretic II at 1024x768, which was a very respectable resolution back then. If I recall correctly, I upgraded from the 100 MHz Pentium 1, so this was quite an upgrade, basically a game changer (almost identical to buying very first 3DFX Voodoo 4 MB card). I think I eventually had GeForce II Ti in the same box.
There was no way in hell that at the then-current prices, non-Celeron CPUs made any sense. The performance differential in games was abysmall, yet for a very significant price hike. By the time full-blown Pentium IIs actually dropped in price, there was Athlon/Duron at 750 MHz and then Pentium II made no sense. It was skipped by everyone I know. Only corporations bought full price PIIs, not sane gamers.
Thus, I disagree extremely strongly with the vid's statement that "this CPU is not recommended!" That's laughable. Everyone I knew upgraded to these puppies, because anything else meant throwing money out the window.
To this day, we all agree, that in history of gaming, there was only one such CPU - and that's this particular Celeron at 266 MHz. It's a historical CPU for a reason, but I guess if one didn't experience it, he can't know....
Like! Considering that practically all Celeron Covington 266 and 300 mhz where able to run at FSB 100 (400 and 450 mhz) they were still nice budget CPUs at that time in early 1998. But they became obsolete really fast just a few months later when the Celeron Mendocino was released.
isn t there a recent generation cpu with the same mendocino moniker?
@@logipilot yea amd mobile zen3 with vega gfx
@@ppolo12*Zen 2
@@ppolo12 Its amd mobile zen 2 with rdna 2 graphics. Its great to have in cheap laptops and chromebooks.
I recall hearing those Celerons were capable of serious overclocking. Would love to see a video where one is pushed to its limit, mainly to see if it could be made into something usable. No doubt an actual PII would outclass it in spades, but it would still make for an interesting video!
Record clocks for this CPU are over 700MHz (140% overclock)
A Celeron 300A overclocked to 450 is as fast as a PII 450, due to the PII having it's larger 512K cache on the processor card and running at half-clock whereas the Celeron's 128K cache is on-die and running at full clock
@foxyloon everything I have read indicates performance was equal to a real PII 450 also there is a vid on UA-cam of a piii pii and celery at 450mhz and performance is identical.
When I was active building computers during the 98-99 timeframe, the biggest seller (November/December 1999) was an overclocked Celeron with a whopping 512mb of ram with a geforce 256 video card.
I had Celeron 266 OC'ed to 448 MHz. Full PII did not make any sense from gamer's standpoint. It was much better to use that money for GFX card. I dont' recall if I started with Riva TNT1 in this box, but eventually ended up with GeForce 2 Ti with some in-between card after TNT2 Ultra (which was a really nice card for this CPU - instant framerate boost).
I was watching CPU prices weekly and by the time full PII dropped to a price where it made sense to buy, it was already seriously outclassed by Athlon/Durons, so it didn't make sense to buy PII (again). But, if you were lighting cigars with $100 bills, I suppose it might have made some sense to buy PII at that time...
I have never ever managed to replicate the framerate boost from upgrade in the decades that followed that compared to this Celeron.
And I bought brand new box 2 months ago, but it's barely "Meh" compared to this Celeron...
My dad used to have the better Celeron 300A, mixed with a TNT 2 Pro, installed with Windows ME (he apparently know how to make it not crap) . I think he built it back in early 2000's - he didnt really have that much money for the latest stuff - the desktop appeared to be good enough playing MohAA, the original Call of Duty, No One Lives Forever, and other stuff that god knows what he played.... He unfortunately sold it back in 2007. Wish he had kept it.
How much did he get for it in 2007? A fiver?
@@patsy02 Havent asked him out yet, but well lets say it def way lower than even entry level oem PCs at that time. Oh, also he didnt use Sound Blaster cards. To him back in its heyday it was too much hassle to deal with.
Amd k2 3d now can be found cheaply but you will need a 400mgz+ to compete with intel 300 .- but for Windows ME- the os have Internet exporer 5 or assume 6.0 later which wont run good or fast on earlier cpus - So a Duron cpu will run games fine and browsers -but even a game as unrael tournament 2004 minimum are a tnt2 and 733mgz amd - I had one and could play 320x200 software mode (900 mghz cpu)- tnt2 could do open gl much better than directx and play the orginal game Unreal Tournament from 1999 in 1024x768
@@494ihi idk dude, my dad loves ME for the fact that it has native USB support. Also he told me that Windows 2000 can also crash if u're using old PCs too. I think he indeed aimed for AMD Thunderbird but dont have the money for it.
@@linkfreeman1998 One can still buy unused Barthon xp cpu's to this day , even thorthon ( gets warm) and throughbreed -all further different versions or thunderbird with different cache size and bus speed + a speed increase to 2200 (the 3200+ xp barthon)
Thanks for this video! I used this CPU in the computer I built for myself to take to my first year of college in 1998. I recently found the Computer Shopper catalog where I spec'd it out from. The CPU seemed amazing to me at the time coming from an AMD 5x86 133. Really appreciate your videos and looking forward to your Patreon launch.
Thanks for sharing! I also enjoy using Wayback machine and looking at old sites and price lists. It feels like yesterday!
Interesting! Nice knowing what to expect from these slow parts as well. This is actually very close to the PC I'm reviewing currently, a Premio with a PII 300. Thanks for another one Phil.
Before even watching, those were practically cacheless Pentium IIs. What a brilliant idea.. well, Celeron 300A fixed all that negative reputation these got.
The A-series didn't just fix the negative reputation, the fact they got full-speed cache put them on par with the full-blooded Pentium II. Not to mention they were overclockable to high heaven.
Can confirm, the 300A was a legit diamond in the rough.
@@borismatesin And overclockable to 450Mhz with just a standard heat sink!
yes, and throw away the whole point of the celeron, the A variants were as poweful as the PIIs costing several times more
@@omegarugal9283 Yup... I remember the benchmarks were pretty much on-par with Pentium II's of the same clock frequency. I never had any issues with mine.
Always interesting to see the difference in performance. The lack of L2 Cache makes a big difference for sure. Keep up the great work Phil.
This era was my entrance to PC gaming. My parents bought a pentium II 350mhz gateway 2000 in 1998 when I was 6. I played Incoming on it along with Unreal, Age or empires II and many others. Lots of happy memories. I was not quite old enough to fully appreciate all the hardware though and was oblivious to the existence of the celeron at the time.
Golden age of PC gaming
Ooh! I remember this one! It had no cache. That's why it sucked. But it also overclocked well.
It had cache. But it was level 1 on-die cache only. The whole reason for Slot 1 was to hold a CPU and outboard level 2 cache on separate chips. The Celeron lacked the level 2 cache to save money. And because there was no need for the card, Intel went back to sockets. The PIII had faster L2 cache on the same die.
I remember at the time a friend had a new pre-built computer with a Slot A Celeron, Voodoo2 and a ViewMaster 15" CRT. I was quite jealous of it! At the time I had a K6 266 had just got one of the 'new' i740 cards from a local computer shop to replace the Diamond Stealth 3D 2000.. It was a decent upgrade, but not a match for the Celery. Later that year I would get a K6-2 300 for the Shuttle HOT-591P motherboard, and was much happier, lasting till I got one my favourite processors, a Duron 800 paired with a MSI K7T Turbo.
Would be nice to see a benchmark video with the Celeron Covington and Mendocino against their biggest rival, the AMD K6-2, preferably with a 3dfx card - Voodoo 2 or Banshee. The K6-2 performs best with 3dfx cards and worse with nvidia ati etc.
Those P2 era Celerons without the Closely Coupled L2 cache was awesome! Ran games of the time great and overclocked like a beast.
The first time I saw TA running in its true glory, was on a duron 900. This was in the days when 64MB was a Godly amount of memory.
I couldn't help but think, "made of celery?" 😳
Always called them that lol
Even with L2 cache, the celerons are very overclockable. I have a few of them
- Celeron 300A (SL2WM): 472 MHz @ 2.2V
- Celeron 333 (engineering sample): 500 MHz @ 2.0v
- Celeron 366 (SL36C): 550 MHz @ 2.0V
Imagine having a celeron 333 overclocked to 500 MHz in 1998... It can beat the most powerful pentium II money can buy
that was because celeron a had on-die 128kb cache. rather than pentium ii style 512kb external cache. External cache modules could never overclock as good as on die caches.
@@mtunayucer and those 128k ran at full CPU speed, 512k of the PII ran at half that...
@@michvod exactly
I had one of these in my first PC as a kid, alongside a Matrox Mystique. Truly an elite gaming machine :D
I do remember it being upgraded to an ATI Rage of some description a bit later, transparency actually working properly was quite the revelation.
Celeron 300A and an Abit BH6 motherboard was the right stuff during this era 🥰🥰 I also had a Banshee as a GPU, and man, that Incoming Forces game ran smooth as a fart slipping on a frozen lake 😁
Had a Celeron 266 clocked to 448 MHz and later a 366 clocked to 550 MHz coupled with a Voodoo3 2000. Worked like a charm, wish I hadnt sold it back in the days😅
If I recall correctly, that L2-Cache wasn't removed exactly but rather not added - the entire SLOT design of the Pentium 2 line ( including Celeron ) came to be because they had trouble adding decent cache to the CPU and required an external solution for it. The same holds true for AMDs Slot-A, and both companies switched back to common sockets as soon as possible due to the stop-gap solution it was.
Slot 1 was my favorite cpu/cooler design ever. It took 10 second to change the cpu with almost no chance of error.
Exactly, and no readding cooling paste when you had coolers already mounted on all of them .
Kinda the first Plug & Play CPU slot 😉
Cache is most definitely important - learned this in the 1990s because my families Compaq Presario 4160 had NO L2 Cache at all, not even the COASt module slot. It was a S L U G. It was a Pentium 150MHz that I secretly overclocked a bit to 166Mhz by moving the bust speed select jumper from 60 to 66MHz. I managed to beg, borrow, and steal it up from the original 24MB of RAM up to 72MB at least.
Even after that I specifically remember that the computers at school - some 100MHz and 120/133 were noticeably quicker and more responsive than the Presario. It was a hateful, slow, ugly slug of a machine.
One of the best things I ever did for one of my old boxes was swap the original C400 for a P3-500. Night and day.
Used to always be standard for vidcard to go in the top slot, sound card in the middle, and and modem in the bottom slot, because of the interrupt problem. I still arrange things that way and never have a problem!
The only Celeron I had back in the day was a 366MHz, oh and there were two of them in the legendary BP6 mb o/c running at 550 MHz and 100MHz bus. It was awesome! Each cpu had a dual stack fan. Still wonder what a modern heat piped cooler would do to squeeze more out of the platform. Thanks for the video Phil. Good content as always. I remember Incoming coming with my wife’s Compaq, a K62 with ATI rage and Aureal on board. Looked and sounded great!
I had the same setup. Got over 600Mhz with water cooling. Aquarium pump in a steel bucket 🙂
Good day when Phil uploads! Hoping for the day I can upgrade my Celeron 420 machine. With the specs it got, even Dungeon Siege (I totally recommend the game, by the way) runs great, just with stutters when new assets load in since I'm relying too much on the pagefile. That game was made for Windows XP, it even came with a Windows Media Player visualizer.
For fighting games, if you want to cover them on the channel, there's a Killer Instinct 1 and 2 port for PCs running DirectX 7 and 9 called KIxxx Split, you'd need hard drive images from the OG XBOX versions of the games or find them online, but I can attest they run marvellously well.
Also give a shot to the Full Tilt! series, where the pinball game from Windows XP came from originally, there's 2 other tables included.
Love that you're going back to the 90s 2000s retro stuff, Phil. Worth picking up where we left off with series 2 of Intel vs AMD?
It's cool to read the comments, everyone is reminecent of the 300A and the awesome games they played on it. I still have the original build that my brother put together, Abit AB-BH6 motherboard with a Celeron 300A, Aureal Vortex A3D soundcard. Only the video card was replaced because it was a crappy Intel i740 to a Riva TNT2, some RAM sticks died along the way and I had to replace the PSU but it's basically the same machine since 1998-99. I love it!
Intel released the OG against K6-2s. Would be nice to loop in K6-2 or even K6-3 in the comparison.
Time is the issue. Adding another CPU tons video, suddenly you have to build a second machine, different drivers and everything takes double the time. That's the main reason I don't do comparisons much and focus more on the "story" of a component.
Awesome! The slot one was my first pc. Bought it from a junk reseller in 2002. After coming off a 133mhz Pentium. This thing was night and day to me. It could actually play AVI files at full speed! And this was also in the dawn of the torrenting era, So I mostly used my pc to watch fansubbed anime. And Burn dreamcast games.
The Celeron was for overclocking . Everyone forgets how expensive Intel used to be and at that point the only other options were K6-2's . The first Celeron I had on a Tyan motherboard was a 433mhz clocked to 588mhz if I remember right until I got a p3 750mhz
K6-3 was 100% FTW. On board L1 and L2 so the cache on the motherboard for Socket 7 became L3.
@@eboethrasher I had the K6-2 first the 333mhz and then the the 500mhz . I couldn't get the k6-3 475mhz because I was broke when they were finally released.
I remember back in the late 90s when I got a first-generation Celeron processor felt like I went back to a 386 processor lolz 😊
Wow, the lack of that L2 cache affects game performance like crazy. GL Quake at 40fps? Yikes!
5:59 Hi Phil, I've been using the same trick all the time! Thanks for letting me know that I'm not alone.
Awesome 😎
Back on the days every enthusiast had a solution for lack of the cache. Just change FSB to 100-112MHz and you are back in the game. You benefit of higher CPU clock and higher menory clock in one time.
awesome vid - PLEASE do the comparison with a PII with the full L2 cache!
A celeron 300A win an ASUS P2B waas my rig at the time. The extra 128K on-chip cache and easy overclock to 450mhz made it a PII killer. It easily fulfilled all my needs until around 2001 when I could no longer ignore the appeal of the Athlon.
Yes and later we got the 300A, what a difference!
Yea it's like, let's the worst Celeron to let's make the best Celeron 😂
Mine ran at 450 MHz 🔥
300A was my first gaming PC built instead of using my dad's office PC. Ran great at 450mhz with a Riva TNT.
Our 1st PC was a Celeron2 366MhZ, RivaTNT 32MB, 128 MB SDRAM. This PC was used to run Age of Empires 2, NFS Hot Pursuit, Commandos1-2, Hitman, Medal of Honor, and it was capable to run GTA3 by using only top view :D The machine held up 3,5 years when the evolving of computers was exponential. It is now kept well packaged with all of its vintage peripherials in a locker room :D
The last time I used a Celeron processor was on a Skylake motherboard with an NVME SSD and 16GB of RAM. For normal tasks like web browsing and running Microsoft Office, it was completely fine.
Interesting stuff as always. Love the Sound blaster EAX test at 3:13 I miss stuff like that aye. Adds a lot to the immersion of a game or film 😄😊
Happy Friday Phil! My son and I were rolling when you said “yeah, both sides are messed up.” Thanks Phil. I remember the backlash when this Celeron came out. It was definitely a setback for Intel at the time.
😄
@@philscomputerlab I remember working in the factory when these were made. Not sure what they were thinking but I wasn’t impressed. The Pentium II and III lines were pretty exciting back in my early days there and I have fond memories of being a part of that. So much has changed since then. I see the late 90s and early
2000s as sort of a golden era of technology growth in computing. Now it just doesn’t seem to have the same feeling when AMD and Intel come out with new CPUs, and I think the technology leaps are so much smaller vs. back then. Perhaps that’s why it just doesn’t feel as exciting as it did back then when new CPUs or GPUs came out.
@@mesterak I agree with you! The Gigahertz race was amazing. Technology progressed and it was exciting reading reviews on Anandtech and Tom's hardware. Now it's minimal improvements or products out of reach like RTX 4090...
Great episode! I had a Soundblaster Live back then and i remember waht a grate and clear sound it had. "Incoming" looks really great andf fun! Didn't know the game!
I think I had this processor after a Pentium 133Mhz, however, I don't remember now, what was my next processor. 23-24 years makes its toll on memories.
The one thing I liked about Supreme Commander over Total Annihilation is that I believe the lore specifically states that all the military units in Supreme Commander, aside from the Commander, were robots and so I felt a whole lot less terrible for sending waves upon waves to their destruction.
Dude, I love your vids! Thank you for making them! This is usually how I spend my mealtimes. With Phil's.
That's awesome, thanks!
I remember people arguing if it was worth buying a Slot1 + C266 or sticking with OCed 166/200MMX or going with AMD on socket7.
The original Slot 1 Celeron may have been a dog, but the Socket 370 300A that followed shortly was able to be overclocked by 50%. At the time, my best workstation (a Compaq Professional Workstation) had two 450 MHz PII CPUs, as did most of the ProLiant machines in our data center. A 300 MHz 300A overclocked to 450 MHz came pretty close in performance. At the time there was a motherboard that had two sockets for the 300A. Combined with an inexpensive 100 MHz HiPoint ATA RAID controller, it came quite close to the Compaq with fast wide SCSI II RAID, for a fraction of the Compaq's cost. Yes, I had one...of each.
Back then, SETI@Home was the big thing in distributed computing. And with my twin twin 450 MHz powerhouses, I quickly became a top producer for the project. Then somebody installed the SETI@Home client on hundreds of desktop machines where he worked, and took the lead with stolen CPU cycles. At the time I had access to not hundreds, but thousands of machines. But they were at a hospital, and I wasn't about to put lives at stake out of competitiveness.
I remember that project!
I never knew Celeron could do dual CPU setup. I thought it was restricted to Pentium only
@@SergiuszRoszczyk it was a loophole that Intel quickly closed. SMP on Intel started with the Pentium Pro, and with it the main restriction was the 66 MHz bus that all CPUs shared. With the Pentium II, regular packages were able to do 2-way SMP, and the new Xeon was required for SMP beyond that. Cache and bus speed were crucial to SMP efficiency, and IME the four and 8-way PII SMP machines couldn't deliver those cores as well as multiple 2-way SMP machines could at a fraction of the price.
The first Celeron was nothing but a PII SERR package without the L2 cache chip. No doubt Intel just assumed that nobody in their right mind would use one for SMP, and they were correct, mostly. The first Celeron was a dog. And it needed the Slot 1 interface, while other low-end CPU products used Socket 7. While the BX chipset was great, budget-minded builders could save a lot of money just upgrading a Socket 7 board.
Clearly it wasn't worth Intel's time to disable SMP in the first Celerons because the CPU itself was a standard PII part. The Mendocino Celerons were different, with a tiny L2 cache on the CPU chip to make the new motherboard worth the added cost. Intel could have disabled SMP on this, but I suspect that they saw the free publicity that the ABIT BP6 dual-Celeron Socket 370 motherboard brought as worth the risk.
When the Coppermine CPU chips came out, SMP was disabled, not just for the Celeron models, but for the PIII ones as well. To get SMP, you had to buy a Xeon, and even then were limited to 2-way. AMD ate Intel's lunch because of that deficiency.
I used to play Incoming back in 99 on Pentium II 300mhz and ATI Rage 128 16mb, cool game
I actually got a PC second hand many many years ago with this exact processor. Had a banshee in it but previous owner didn't have the drivers because CS would only launch in software mode. 64MB of ram and win 98.
Was slow at running an awful lot of things and unfortunately didn't bother trying older dos stuff.
I over clocked my Celeron A to 400 mhz on Octeck mother board were all purchased from their sales point in Sydney ,N.S.W Australia.Also bought a Voodoo 2 of them and running windows 98 second edition. Great combo never any problems.
color keying (Chroma Keying) is removing a certain color from a palette. Commonly used in green screens back in the day to remove the green and add a background. I am going to guess that the 16 Bit render mode of the older cards fits with the games 16-Bit color palette while the GeForce cards did 32 Bit color so it would be off. Yes, I realize the Geforce cards did both 16 and 32 bit in the beginning but 16 bit mode was a subset of the 32 bit mode. That alone would throw the colors off and textures rendered in said color would be off as well.
Loved the game review.... I've had this game on my shelf for decades and could not get it to work. Guess it was my video card back then.
Back in 1998 I was 2nd year of high school and my grandfather used the money he had been putting away for years for my education, toward buying a PC to help me with getting computer skill etc. I remember that the CPU mounting in Slot 1 socket was so wobbly, I had to improvise and used some fly line. I attached it to the CPU's radiator and tied the other end to the top frame of the case, precisely adjusting the fly line's length and tightness, so that the processor is placed perfectly horizontally :-) Good years!
Thank god that Intel released the Celeron 300A, 2 months after the 300 and for $10 less MSRP, which added L2 and was as a Overclocking powerhouse, that brought overclocking to the mainstream. I miss mine.
Luckily Intel introduced the 300A, which was ridiculously overclockable!
Intel cut too much with its first Celeron releases and not enough with its later releases under the same branding. No L2 cache hurt way too much. The cut-down yet faster than Pentium-II L2 cache on later models made Celerons easy to overclock and really challenge Pentium-2's performance-wise clock for clock. That was a real win for consumers and not Intel. People who got their hands on a Celeron 300A and overclocked it can really relate to this.
I used and tried the Celeron and PII back in the day and always find the PII more potent, and Yes I know the Celeron can overclock but so does the PII, I always overclocked the Bus with a PII and it would always beat the Celerons. I was using a PII 333 overclocked from 66 to 100 Bus which made it run at 400Mhz and it was tons of performance back then, you did not even need adjusted voltages or anything. just up the Bus and you were good to go. Still have all my stuff today, but since long in the same computer I did all this I have a PIII 550 and it is a Dos and 98 BEAST!
I really like if you include such "mini reviews" for retro games in you future videos.
That's the way I want to proceed. I enjoy playing more rather than just benchmark the same level...
Ever try BattleZone II? It's one of my favorite retro games - its an interesting mix of first person vehicle combat and RTS. Definitely worth a look if you aren't familiar with it. I played it for the first time on my first compute a 500mhz HP Celeron system.
I remember this! I only saw its benchmark in a (printed) magazine and I was outraged as how anyone would give money for this. Its numbers from your benchmarks and others I could find on the internet now, don't look too bad on the average - but they cannot show what I always saw as the bane of Celeron processors, and especially this one: the stuttering, and how everything suddenly falls apart when there are "too many" things to handle at the same time. Although your TA gameplay gives a hint of that.
I remember reading an article in 2003 about installing a Slot 1 to Socket 370 converter and run a Tulatin Celeron on a 440BX motherboard.
My very first computer was actually an Acer laptop powered by an Intel celeron clocked at 400mhz. It had 64mb of RAM, a 40gb HDD and 2mb of vram but no direct 3d. I only played games that supported software render. Midtown madness came installed on it.
My father got it from a guy who worked at the airport's carry-on check point back 1999. Great memories! Cleaning and fixing that laptop it's how I became a technician.
For me Celeron is the best 😅
My first "modern" family PC had a 400 or 433Mhz Celeron, 96mb of RAM and some onboard/integrated ATI Rage graphics and it ran TA like a champ, though, it'd struggle if you overrided the unit cap, load up huge maps, or cranked up the resolution too much. In your setup, I'd wager that it's some combination of the resolution and the lack of L2 cache on that Celeron that's causing the performance to stutter around. Otherwise, TA ran great on a lot of low power hardware of this era and beyond.
The original Celeron 266 & 300 were pretty bad due to the complete lack of L2 cache. However, since there was no L2 present they were great over clockers (much like the "A" versions that came after them) and bumping the FSB up to 100+ MHz helped negate some of the penalty of no L2.
In the end we all remember the "A" versions of the Celeron due to their awesome overclocking ability and how having even 128KB of L2 running at full CPU speed made a MASSIVE difference in performance. I had the legendary Celeron 300A in an Abit BH6 mainboard that ran at 464 Mhz (4.5 * 103 MHz FSB) for a number of years.
Later on I upgraded to a Socket 370 Celeron 566A in a Asus P3V4X mainboard with the help of a slotket adapter. That CPU ran at 875 MHz for a couple of years (8.5 * 103 MHz FSB) The L2 equipped Celerons were good CPUs for the money!
I got Incoming as a pack-in with my Creative Labs 3D Blaster Voodoo 2, along with... I wanna say Actua Soccer 2? or 3?
Can't say I played it all that much...
Overclocking Celerons in the old days was fun. Shame that the last truly overclockable ones were on LGA775.
The Celeron at 300 MHz was bad, disrespectful to any user, but it did not behave as horrible as many expected. It is important to take into account the major competition at that time: the AMD K6-2. Even with a 100MHz bus, the K6-2 was struggling to cope with integer arithmetic's, while it shine in the few 3DNow! optimized games. The K6 architecture did not incorporate an L2 cache until the + and K6-3 lineup, that was way too costly and came too late to change enough. In this competition, the Celeron fared quite decently as it had a much more modern FPU and microarchitecture, being based on the Pentium 2 architecture.
In short, where it would really matter, particularly in games, the Pentium 2 microarchitecture and the solid performance of the 440BX chipset motherboards made the Celeron a very powerful performer. There was no match between it and the aging Super Socket 7 architecture AMD coped with on the low end.
In the end, it should not be forgotten that the Celeron had another ace up its sleeve, the incredible overclocking potential. This made even the non-revised Celeron a dirt-cheap CPU with an incredible potential. The revised Celeron 300A, that also included an L2 cache, completely blown the competition, showing the biggest comeback in the low-end for Intel. AMD could not immediately respond with a cost-cut Duron which meant that Intel won valuable marketshare right after they started slowly lost it. Of course, Intel had massive support from OEM's. They could not have pulled such a victory as easily in other circumstances and they never had such an achievement ever since.
The k6 did fine at integer math where it fell on it's face was floating point performance. It was very fast at general use tasks at the time but in gaming especially games that relied on heavy floating point math would massively underperform. the k6-2 and later models improved FP math and introduced 3DNow technology to address the floating point deficiency even further there's even a version of Quake 2 that takes advantage of it and it actually performed really well at the time.
@@bdhale34 Even at integer performance, the K6 was outdated compared with a Pentium II and, by extension, a Celeron based on the same architecture. I agree that the FPU was the much more important issue and the main reason why AMD K6-2 had 3DNow!, as it had a much improved performance for floating point mathematics. The K6-3 and K6-2+ only added an integrated L2 cache but left the rest of the architecture unused.
The major turnaround AMD had was with the Athlon. This revolutionary architecture was finally competitive with the Pentium III.
With 3DNow! there was a multifaceted problem: you had to optimize drivers, which 3dfx did quite well but other manufacturers were not as interested, and you also had to optimize applications. Few programs were truly optimized for 3DNow!, but I agree that Quake 2 was a very good example.
I remember finding an articule in Tomshardware where you covered the pin B21 and the 266 gave 400 mhz !!!! it was amazing at the time.......
Celeron 300A/333 was pretty good, nicely overclockable too.
I remember a reviewer calling it the "Gutless Wonder"
Wow that's a great title!
For those posting do not confuse the Celeron 300 (Covington) w/ no L2 (That Phil is reviewing) with the Celeron 300A (Mendocino) that had L2, which was an overclocker's dream. Covington = Bad / Mendocino = Good
Yeah. Total annihilation, the best RT strategy game ever. So rich with so many options. Loved it.
Well, the CPU is meant as an Office machine. Win98 or NT4 running MSOffice, Outlook and maybe some custom application someone threw together in VB6.
This could make a nice DOS machine tough if you already have it lying around, just needs a proper ISA sound card of course. ;)
It is a shame that no one that I know of at least ever came up with a slot one motherboard that had level two cash on the board!
my first experience of incoming was on the sega dreamcast which i might add is a very faithful port . its actually the best option to run on windows 10 and newer due to those forced updates that keep rebreaking the pc version
You probably ran Total Annihilation at a too high resolution, this game does not support 3D acceleration so everything is on the CPU. 1080p 3D software rendering might be a little too much for a cache less Celeron, hence the slideshow. It could run better than this on a mere P200 if you stuck to 800*600 or 1024*768 at most.
My thoughts exactly. No-one played the game above 1600x1200 back when the game and the CPU were in their prime, hell, hardly anyone went above 1024x768, so we shouldn’t expect miracles in that area.
Back in the day we moved from a pentium 150mhz pc to this 266mhz celeron pc as the older 150mhz pc had no agp slot.
First Celeron 266 owner here. 32mb ram , 2d sis + 4mb voodoo 3d accelerator. It was good for me, as the HalfLife and Quake 2 was playable :)
In my very old days, i had a celeron A with 333 MHz, paired with a GeForce 256 card and two voodoo 2 cards - paid and built by myself, except the CPU which i got for free, due to great results in a IT internship. I had this system for many years and was very happy with it. For most cases, the geforce card was much faster than both voodoo 2 cards, but i could play all glide based games without any problems in 1024x768. Interestingly, i recently started a video series, that gets me back into my PC childhood, playing retro games and recreating my very first systems i had with the software PCem - and, the celeron is the very last system i had which works very well on PCem.
First time I watch a video 7 seconds after it drops. 😮
A new record 😀😊
Hit the bell icon and be early every time!
@@MarcoGPUtuber I did. It doesn’t always work though. And I don’t always see the notification as soon as it drops anyway. I’m not really into needing to watch a video right at launch. It’s just as good to watch some of the older videos that are several years old. Most of Phil’s videos have held up well.
USB really is a struggle in Windows 98SE. To install any device, you have to click through the dialog boxes, but paradoxically you can't use a USB mouse until you click through those boxes. If you have a USB keyboard AND mouse and forgot to plug in a PS/2 device, you just have to force the machine off. It's really unintuitive.
Oh and yeah, USB IRQs want to conflict with EVERYTHING. It's a hassle.
The joys of Windows 98. Later Pentium 4 I didn't have this issue but the early boards yes for sure
I put a Soundblaster EAX card in both my retro rigs and vound a Creative Labs EAX 5.1 surround speaker set for cheap.
If you were to set the fsb to 100mhz this beast will run at 400mhz, the fact they didn't have a cache made them great cheap overclockers, would be cool to add that in with your comparison with a Pentium 2 when you upgrade later
Yeah, but don't forget to include screenshot of then-current prices and a link to Tom's HW benchmark explicitly mentioning how much you'll pay for a tiny performance increase coming from real PII.
And how much more performance you would get if spent the same money on gfx card :)
12:55 Vamps for days! Also, I own multiple copies of TA. I did find a tor version as well, that's optimized and runs much better on older systems. The game had a lot of math issues, also 5000 unit cap is AWESOME!
Hmm Imran into a 500 unit limit. Is yours a community patch maybe?
If your board can run this it'll run a P2 , and a P3 Katmai , almost certainly . So why would you. Asides from overclocking the bejesus out of it just because you can , but then a 66mhz bus P2 is still going to o/c the same . Stripping the L2 cache was just such a cheap move. I have about 90% of the slot 1 P2 and P3s at my disposal , not a single Celery. Nice video, as always , Phil.
TA is my absolute most favourite game and I have played it a *hell* of a lot, even on modern machines when there is a LOT of action the game sometimes skips playing some sounds. I think it's just a limitation of the game itself. I can't remember right now if the modern patches run on Windows 98 but if they do, they allow you to play the CD audio by having it in the game folder as MP3s ;)
Yes gog version streams music from files...
@@philscomputerlab Ah, cool! I’m too used to running the 3.9 patch on a backup copy I made of the retail release 😅
I'm a little bit disappointed that you seem to not have an A3D-Soundcard on hand for specific games 😜 ... But maybe that's an idea for a future project?
About the Celeron, I remember having had lots of fun with my 300A @450MHz, I think I ran it with a Voodoo 3 3000 first and then with a Geforce 2 MX. Crazy times with frequent hardware upgrades ...
I wonder how this compares to some super socket 7 stuff like the K6-2s at similar clock speeds as while the celeron was late, it might have been a lot of peoples introduction into a platform with an upgrade path over dying sockets, imagine going from such a processor to a PII 450, PIII 1000, could take you through some video cards and memory/storage upgrades, my pentium III 550mhz has been waiting since i picked it up as a kid at a car boot sale to go into a system with the Riva TNT2 Ultra :P
Was it slower than my P200 MMX?
I remember when these were released and laughing at them. Then they released the 300A and I never saw one that wouldnt run at 464Mhz. What a differnece between models.
I remember him well. Only AMD's K6 was even slower. A processor that made big negative headlines in the trade press.
We called this terrible CPU the Celery, the name stuck even when they became pretty good budget options with the 'A' models.
Then the 300A, and you have to wonder if its supreme overclockability was a deliberate "lets destroy the opposition" move by Intel
Low FSB-speeds killed even faster Celerons back then. 100MHz was not enough to compete with Pentium3 EB-models w/ 133MHz FSB. Not even close. We actually tested that Pentium3 800/133 was about 15-20% faster than Celeron 850/100 with many games with same GPU.
Total Annihilation looks like a slide show it's no wonder the sound is dropping.
O remember when this EAS launched. I was at Brazil’s FENASOFT when i first see the Pentium 2 abs Celeron 266mhz.
I don’t recall the model Celeron but it was 1998-ish and we overclocked them to 466 and they were rockets. Very cheap “render farm” for us.
Likely 300A or 333A
I'm with ya on easy or very normal difficulties in games, they are meant to be fun!
Only Celeron I've owned was the 533mhz but that had L2 cache and ran games in windows 98 fine, think I upgraded to an Athlon XP relatively quickly when I migrated to Windows XP though.
Phil, have you ever said what hdmi capture you use?