Gahhhrrrlic wrote:

Another mystery solved. I bought a P3 733 chip with 133 fsb. I did this to keep the MHz speed as close as possible to what I had before. Guess what... the Celeron is a complete dog. The P3 wipes the floor with it, probably because of how it's also affecting memory and bus speeds to boot. Everything runs smooth at 1280 resolution. I may even put Halo on this machine.

This is like deja vu for me. I just had a breakthrough with another machine... a P133 that was failing to run something as crummy as Wipeout XL at 320 resolution... that is until I swapped it with a replacement CPU of the same type and speed and found out the first one must have been damaged but still working. Again the difference was night and day.

I have new respect for CPUs. It's not all about the GPU and RAM if your CPU blows chunks and the speed is no indication of anything. 700 sounds like a lot but my (properly working now) P133 can do a better job with UT99 and a voodoo card... barely.

when you consider that you are going to twice the l2 with higher bandwidth, and your ram is going from 66 to 133, yeah, I would expect some huge changes if the performance is being limited by that aspect (which is likely in this case)

now Halo, I'm not sure, I've had some really bad results trying to play some Xbox ports/multiplatforms with a p3 750 (I think NFSUG was specially bad), but I think I had a friend playing Halo with a p3 1GHz back when it was released OK.

SPBHM wrote:

Gahhhrrrlic wrote:

Another mystery solved. I bought a P3 733 chip with 133 fsb. I did this to keep the MHz speed as close as possible to what I had before. Guess what... the Celeron is a complete dog. The P3 wipes the floor with it, probably because of how it's also affecting memory and bus speeds to boot. Everything runs smooth at 1280 resolution. I may even put Halo on this machine.

This is like deja vu for me. I just had a breakthrough with another machine... a P133 that was failing to run something as crummy as Wipeout XL at 320 resolution... that is until I swapped it with a replacement CPU of the same type and speed and found out the first one must have been damaged but still working. Again the difference was night and day.

I have new respect for CPUs. It's not all about the GPU and RAM if your CPU blows chunks and the speed is no indication of anything. 700 sounds like a lot but my (properly working now) P133 can do a better job with UT99 and a voodoo card... barely.

when you consider that you are going to twice the l2 with higher bandwidth, and your ram is going from 66 to 133, yeah, I would expect some huge changes if the performance is being limited by that aspect (which is likely in this case)

now Halo, I'm not sure, I've had some really bad results trying to play some Xbox ports/multiplatforms with a p3 750 (I think NFSUG was specially bad), but I think I had a friend playing Halo with a p3 1GHz back when it was released OK.

Quite possibly. I can tell you from what I've learned tonight alone that the game does technically run and rather smooth I might add, so long as not too much is going on. It seems to be CPU limited though, as resolution doesn't much affect the gameplay but multiple NPCs and explosions apparently do. The game is playable but not what I would call enjoyable due to the constant framerate issues that will invariably crop up from time to time. I wanted to try it out though because it's got A3D 3.0 support and I have a couple of A3D cards I wanted to test with it. Also I wonder if overclocking the FSB to 140MHz will make the game any faster, since the FSB seems to have been at the root of this problem all along.

Your thread made me really wonder how bad these celeron CPUs are. I ended up doing a comparison of a celeron 700 and a few other CPUs. I used an aopen AX6BC 440bx board (mainly because it works with slot1 and s370 cpus) with 256MB of PC133 and a radeon 8500 (was going to use a 9700pro but it didn't like the higher AGP clock that you get on a BX board with a 133MHz FSB). Sound was enabled for all the tests and I used an SBlive card. The results were all at 1024x768 resolution, half life was 16bit colour and the rest were 32bit.

Here are the results:

It does look like your results are better than mine for the 700 so I must admit there could be another factor in my setup that's affecting the results. However I think it's still safe to say that the FSB speed of the chip is huge and the C700 is a poor performer because of that. I could have upgraded to a faster chip but I deliberately chose the 733 because it was as close as I could match the speed as possible while just getting the faster FSB and extra cache. I think 33 MHz is within the margin of measurement error and should not be attributed to the dramatic increase in speed I saw. Thanks for posting these results. They are quite informative.

Wow, I'm surprised that the Celeron 700 performs THAT bad compared to the Pentium II. On the other hand, I've had my share of Celerons over the years, but never ran one at less than 100 MHz fsb .. That might influence my general view on Celerons .. 🤣

H3nrik V! wrote:

Wow, I'm surprised that the Celeron 700 performs THAT bad compared to the Pentium II. On the other hand, I've had my share of Celerons over the years, but never ran one at less than 100 MHz fsb .. That might influence my general view on Celerons .. 🤣

FSB + Cache FTW

H3nrik V! wrote:

On the other hand, I've had my share of Celerons over the years, but never ran one at less than 100 MHz fsb ..

yep, and even that 700 should be able to reach 90-95MHz FSB with some overvolting (100MHz if you are lucky)

Need to dig out a BX board soon to do some comparative testing .. 😀