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Celeron 300

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Reply 20 of 48, by Splinter

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Sorry to bash PC Chips, but it's a fact that out of all the mobos I've had to replace in the last few years it's been 75% of that make along with ECS.
Maybe I'm just lucky that this old one still manages to fire up....touch wood.

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Reply 21 of 48, by idspispopd

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vetz wrote:
Splinter wrote:

I can't tell if it's a Cel 300A. CPUID shows it's a Covington.

That is unfortunately not the 300A. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Ce … 22_.28250_nm.29

IIRC the cache-less Covingtons could also easily be overclocked. Of course they were slower than Mendocinos, but the hit was not as bad in 3D games as it was in Office applications.
But I agree that a faster CPU would be a better match for Voodoo2 SLI.

Reply 23 of 48, by NJRoadfan

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Splinter wrote:

Sorry to bash PC Chips, but it's a fact that out of all the mobos I've had to replace in the last few years it's been 75% of that make along with ECS.
Maybe I'm just lucky that this old one still manages to fire up....touch wood.

No surprise given that ECS merged with PC Chips. Both were bottom of the barrel garbage. ECS has been trying to improve their name for years, but given that the alternatives aren't much more, why bother with them?

Reply 24 of 48, by Splinter

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Update: Had a rummage and found a box of P2's which I thought I had lost in the move last year.
Changed the Celeron for a PII 266/512 which is showing up as 300Mhz, even though I can't see any way of tweaking in the BIOS.

http://www.compufixshop.com
Main rig Ryzen 2600X Strix RX580 32GB RAM
Secondary rig FX8350 GTX960 16GB RAM

Reply 25 of 48, by northernosprey02

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Splinter wrote:

Update: Had a rummage and found a box of P2's which I thought I had lost in the move last year.
Changed the Celeron for a PII 266/512 which is showing up as 300Mhz, even though I can't see any way of tweaking in the BIOS.

Curiously what is the box picture....

Reply 26 of 48, by Splinter

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Box picture?
This?
31052013614_zps5d2efed0.jpg

http://www.compufixshop.com
Main rig Ryzen 2600X Strix RX580 32GB RAM
Secondary rig FX8350 GTX960 16GB RAM

Reply 28 of 48, by northernosprey02

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Splinter wrote:
Box picture? This? http://i212.photobucket.com/albums/cc102/rufinoman/31052013614_zps5d2efed0.jpg […]
Show full quote

Box picture?
This?
31052013614_zps5d2efed0.jpg

Owh I think it was retail box 🤣

Reply 29 of 48, by Standard Def Steve

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I ran a Covington 300 in my Deskpro 4000 a while back just to see how slow it would be. It was really bad. Windows 2000 took forever to load and it really killed game performance as well. The mouse pointer also skipped around the screen during heavy disk usage. My PII-300 felt a good 4-5x faster in the same machine.
My DP4000 uses the 440FX chipset and 60ns EDO memory--probably a combination Intel never imagined the cacheless Covington would have to deal with. I'd be really interested to know well your Celeron performs with much faster SDRAM.

Reply 30 of 48, by sliderider

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Standard Def Steve wrote:

I ran a Covington 300 in my Deskpro 4000 a while back just to see how slow it would be. It was really bad. Windows 2000 took forever to load and it really killed game performance as well. The mouse pointer also skipped around the screen during heavy disk usage. My PII-300 felt a good 4-5x faster in the same machine.
My DP4000 uses the 440FX chipset and 60ns EDO memory--probably a combination Intel never imagined the cacheless Covington would have to deal with. I'd be really interested to know well your Celeron performs with much faster SDRAM.

This has given me an idea. Since we normally would disable cache to bring the speed down to run old games, and how Covington has no cache to start with, it would be interesting to see what speed 386 or 486 a Covington Celeron would equate to.

Reply 31 of 48, by m1so

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I don't think that it is so bad. It has L1 cache, just no L2, so it is not really "cacheless". It is faster than a 200 Mhz Pentium 1 MMX for sure. It can be quite good with two SLI-ed Voodoo 2 cards.

Reply 32 of 48, by m1so

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Standard Def Steve wrote:

I ran a Covington 300 in my Deskpro 4000 a while back just to see how slow it would be. It was really bad. Windows 2000 took forever to load and it really killed game performance as well. The mouse pointer also skipped around the screen during heavy disk usage. My PII-300 felt a good 4-5x faster in the same machine.
My DP4000 uses the 440FX chipset and 60ns EDO memory--probably a combination Intel never imagined the cacheless Covington would have to deal with. I'd be really interested to know well your Celeron performs with much faster SDRAM.

I don't think Windows 2000 is a good idea for that system, or ANY gaming system for that matter.

Reply 33 of 48, by Splinter

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Standard Def Steve wrote:

I ran a Covington 300 in my Deskpro 4000 a while back just to see how slow it would be. It was really bad. Windows 2000 took forever to load and it really killed game performance as well. The mouse pointer also skipped around the screen during heavy disk usage. My PII-300 felt a good 4-5x faster in the same machine.
My DP4000 uses the 440FX chipset and 60ns EDO memory--probably a combination Intel never imagined the cacheless Covington would have to deal with. I'd be really interested to know well your Celeron performs with much faster SDRAM.

I changed the Covington for the PII 266 and the difference is very noticeable especially in Half Life, Tomb Raider and general use.
Having said that, the Celeron wasn't all that bad but I've now put it out to grass.

Reply 34 of 48, by jwt27

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m1so wrote:
Standard Def Steve wrote:

I ran a Covington 300 in my Deskpro 4000 a while back just to see how slow it would be. It was really bad. Windows 2000 took forever to load and it really killed game performance as well. The mouse pointer also skipped around the screen during heavy disk usage. My PII-300 felt a good 4-5x faster in the same machine.
My DP4000 uses the 440FX chipset and 60ns EDO memory--probably a combination Intel never imagined the cacheless Covington would have to deal with. I'd be really interested to know well your Celeron performs with much faster SDRAM.

I don't think Windows 2000 is a good idea for that system, or ANY gaming system for that matter.

...because?

Reply 35 of 48, by RacoonRider

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m1so wrote:

I don't think that it is so bad. It has L1 cache, just no L2, so it is not really "cacheless". It is faster than a 200 Mhz Pentium 1 MMX for sure. It can be quite good with two SLI-ed Voodoo 2 cards.

Red Hill states overwise when it comes to 266, 300 is not much better at all:

Technically the Celeron was a stock-standard Pentium II with no secondary cache at all. It came in the form of a massive and not inexpensive SEC cartridge which was mostly empty space, required a substantially more expensive motherboard than competing chips, was touted as an all-new and rather wonderful device with an outstanding 266MHz clock speed, and couldn't even match the product it replaced in Intel's line-up.

Reply 37 of 48, by m1so

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jwt27 wrote:

...because?

It is a Windows NT based OS - no DOS support, many pre-2000 games don't work, or work badly, many later games have problems too. It is also the most unstable Windows NT based OS, at least in my opinion.

Reply 39 of 48, by jwt27

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m1so wrote:
jwt27 wrote:

...because?

It is a Windows NT based OS - no DOS support, many pre-2000 games don't work, or work badly, many later games have problems too. It is also the most unstable Windows NT based OS, at least in my opinion.

No DOS support... well duh! We have DOS for that. As if the "reboot to DOS" option in Win9x was that great.

There are indeed a few games that won't work on 2k, just because they check if you have 9x or NT and just refuse to run on NT for no reason. But these are exceptions and most work just fine.

Of the NT line, 2K might have been the most unstable.. Compared to a clean XP install with the latest upgrades and no third party drivers, maybe. My experience still says otherwise, but whatever. Compared to 9x is a no-brainer, 2K beats that any day. And in performance as well. Try comparing framerates in 9x vs 2K and you'll see.