I've won that lottery on my Ryzen 7 5800X3D. I lost the lottery on my previous Ryzen 5 5600X, which needs one of the cores to be boosted +5 on the PBO optimizer.
My friend upgraded first in 1998 to a cheap 440LX board with a Celeron 266. Just a couple months later I followed with a 440BX board and a 300A@450 for roughly the same price. Imagine how not happy he was. Not happy at all.
Yes also 800Mhz then 1.0ghz, Then came Hyperthreading CPU's Pentium 4, in 2003/4 they were expensive. The Celerons sold out more since Pentium 4 CPU's and Desktop PC's were expensive, Intel Celeron was ideal for those on a budget and those that do not require a 3D Accelerated Graphics card with 128MB, 256MB RAM for playing video games. etc.
300A @ 450 daily, 504 was 99% stable. Cooler days/AC on helped 😂 558* in winter with PC case sitting next to sliding glass door.. Enough stability for benchmarks but that's about it, if that. *swear this was 576 but math doesn't add up after downloading Abit mobo manual.
Back in 1998 I was pricing up a Pentium II 450 machine, and the local computer shop said to me "I don't want to sell you that". He recommended a 300A at the much cheaper price and promised I could run it at 450. Used that PC for years, and it was absolutely rock solid, and yes I played Unreal Tournament on it too!
Wow! Nice to have someone recommending something reasonable to you despite the fact that their commission would have probably been higher selling a PII 450!
Awesome CPU! Back then we read about the CeleronA capabilities in a PC mag and my brother bought one. It worked and we couldn't believe getting P2 performance for a bargain. Great times! Btw. UT99 was my absolute favourite shooter, soooo much fun!
I worked in a PC shop when these were new. The owner liked a game running in the window overnight as advertising. 4:55pm one day I didn't have a demo machine. I banged a CPU into a motherboard and started a game. The next morning I arrived and moved the mouse and the system bluescreened. Getting it on the bench, I realised I'd put a Celeron 300 in a board set to 4.5x 100MHz. Legendary CPU.
Hell yes, same here, exact same timeframe. I really think of it as "the good times" but that might just be because I'm 40 and everyone thinks of their 20s as "the good times" lol
me too was doing work experience in 1998 at a computer shop.... i can remember people coming in and complaining about the new Ultima game ultima 8 peagon or something that it needed a super computer to run , Pentium 2 266 min for 1998 min game requirements was insane at the time and it was jerky at that.... people were buying all these add on graphics and we had so many people complain about drivers and threatening the shop as there were no refunds when the 3d didnt work.... seeing reviews now the customers were right and 3d was sooo buggy then. i remember the CYRIX MX chip cpu was still selling alright but on its last days.
@@the_kombinator it's no longer interesting because to draw out a 10% increase in performance (basically useless and you can't tell the difference) you tinker for days, double your power draw and then you go back to default because it's not worth it. Now imagine buying an a64 running at 1.8ghz and overclocking it to 2.8ghz. It's like buying the cheapest of intel i3 today and having it perform as an i9 14900k. that is what tinkering could get you back then and what made it interesting.
@@PuOop-j9l Which is why my modern computer is like my daily driver - an appliance. I mess with my 4G63 Weber fed 40 year old Hyundai for the weekends, and I keep opening my 386 DX/33 machine and experiment on it.
The arrival of the Socket 370 Celerons was perfect. Abit releasing their BP6 motherboard with dual CPU support was life-changing for my 3D graphics work. It took a while to find a pair of 366MHz Celerons that would reliably run at 550MHz while keeping the stock voltage. I could run all-day render jobs without a single hiccup. That machine was a beast. I maxed the RAM out to 768MB using three PC-133 256MB sticks while dropping CAS latency down to 2 since I was basically underclocking the RAM. Having that much RAM saved a lot of time in an era where hard drives were so slow.
for 1998 or 1999 that computer would of been a beast ... i had one of the cheaper computers new in 1999 a celeron 433 with 64 ram and that was a huge upgrade over my 486 with win 95.
hard drives were not that slow i mean 1999 they were close to peaking the tech on the IDE mechanical drive ... they were far faster then the early 90s and you still had a 30 meg second transfer speed then that was lighting quick at the time , a quad cdrom drive was only 600 kbps for comparison
I just remember the stories from my friends. They all said bad things about the Celeron - even when it got 128 KBs of level 2 cache. It's funny how cache makes such a big difference - at least between having NO cache and having a little bit of cache.
no it had cache im sure... i had a 386 sx33 in xmas 1992 and it didnt have a math co-processor, your probably thinking about that , that was on the DX chip and probably made a big diff... i know doom 2 on the 386 wasnt really playable but on the 486 dx4100 it ran fine
when I built a PC on an intel platform with a CeleronA more than 90 percent of the CPU went stable at 450Mhz, even on the new Socket 370 platform I was successful and everything worked without a problem
Interesting video. The Celeron Covington was also an overclocking monster, the 266 mhz version could overclock to 400 mhz (4x100) and the 300 mhz one to 450 mhz (4.5x100).
It was my 2nd PC. Had bought it in November 1998 and have been using until summer 2003 ! :) Really great CPU!!!! I played Quake3, Blood2, Half Life, Age of Empires 2.
Brings back memories. I was sitting in this year digital electronics lectures and we covered how increased gate voltages could allow the gates to shut faster. This was before i knew about overclocking. So i went and applied this to my AMD K6. It was indeed true. I also managed to use my motherboard as a flash memory programmer. By copying ROMs to RAM you can remove your BIOS chip from the motherboard while it's running. Then insert another chip into the motherboard and flash it. Just what you need when you got a virus that reprogrammed your BIOS. Who says my education was wasted.
This was when Grand Prix Legends came out, a leap forward for race simulation physics, bringing Pentium 1 chips to its knees. You would still end up on fire, upside down, somewhere in a tree with an overclocked Celeron 300A, but you would do so at higher frame rates.
At the time I was planning on upgrading my Pentium MMX 166, first to the market came AMD K6-2 and then Celeron 300A, I went with the Celeron and was very happy with it even though my sample was not completely stable at 450MHz with my Abit motherboard. Drove it at ~370MHz and sometimes at 450. It was oh so close, friend of mine had a completely stable model at 450MHz. Thank you for the video!
It was April 1999, when my friend and I went to a local computer hardware store to buy those Celeron 300A. We've even persuaded the store manager to quick test CPUs for overclocking!! (because we told him we're going to buy 2 CPUs, not only 1). Tests were successful for the first two random CPUs from their store and we happily went home for building our PCs. We used 300A with Acorp 6ZX86 (i440ZX, AGP+PCI+ISA, Slot1, BabyAT format). Than MB was able to supply even more than 100 MHz. The CPU tested ok at 105@4.5, but I used it at 100 MHz for stability. The CPU served me flawlessly for 1,5 years and was upgraded to Celeron 600 (Coppermine) with the same 50% overclock. Those were fun times!
I built a system in 1998 with a 300a overclocked to 450 mHz and 2 Voodoo 2's in sli, as a college graduation present to myself. Still have the 300a and the Voodoo's. I might have to get a motherboard and rebuild it :)
I got my Celeron 300A up to 464MHz at stock voltage. That chip was a beast at the time. Lasted a couple years before I upgraded to a 750MHz Athlon, and eventually a 1GHz Athlon.
I had a dual MB with 2 @ 450. It ran my AudioWarez for many years. Tweaked it one day for 400ish and the FSB speed was just enough weird to immediately wipe the SCSI drives I had connected. IDE was not affected in the same way. Went back to 450 and was able to confirm my backups were actually viable.
Yeah had one of these and it ran flawlessly at 450 MHz its entire life. I was amazed that a CPU could overclock that much and it felt like additional extra upgrade since the Celeron system replaced a P150 system
Great video and legendary CPU. As many others have already alluded to, those were interesting and fun days for CPUs. Overclocking that actually mattered, pencils for multiplier unlocks and lots more fun to be had. Same with GPUs. Remember modding the ATi 9500 to a 9700 with some luck.
It is one of the only mods I attempted back then since I was about older and started to tinker with my hardware: mod a Radeon 9500. Unfortunately, mine had non-working pixel pipelines. I don't know how many of the four dormant pipelines were defective, but I had black squares everywhere once I unlocked them using the driver mod.
This brings back some memories, me and some friends had this CPU and we all overclocked it, mine ran 504Mhz on air cooling (112MHz fsb) but my friends brother toyed around with water cooling and peltiers and managed to get 600Mhz on theirs.
What a legendary CPU, I had one back in the days and it was the best deal I ever had on a CPU (Except for the 7950x currently in my system that I got the the equivalent of 350$US.... But buying a low end CPU and getting it to run as well as the one in my roommate's PC for a fraction of the price was just amazing!
I bought that same CPU back then and overclocked it too. Amazing CPU for that price at that time. 2 other friends did the same. We were the overclocking kings of the school :D
Great memories! Back then I got a Celeron 366 (with Slotket) and an Abit BX6 Rev. 2.0. I overclocked it (with slight overvolting of 0.1V via BIOS (Abit was really nice!)) to 550 MHz and had a blast! Just magic times for gamers on a budget.
I had one of those. Made the hardware mod with bridging those two transistors on the CPU board, or what they were, very simple, and it worked perfectly the whole time, for many years. It was a rocketship in games.
back in september 1998 (if i remember well), i had purchased the Abit BH6 packed with the Celeron 300A clocked at 450mhz (some sellers in Paris were offering such a pre-tested bundle) paired with the Voodoo Banshee AGP. It was an incredible beast !
Hi, can you make a video on Coppermine-128 based celerons in the future? They were also amazing overclockers. Back in the day I had Celeron 566 on MSI BX Master mobo (with adapter) and not only it easily did 850 MHz (50% OC), but I used it on 952 MHz for everyday use, it could boot non-stable at 1050 MHz, and I think it was stable at 1030 MHz or something with voltage boost. But as I said I used it everyday on 952 MHz with no voltage boost. Maybe you can make a video on some of these?
I an still collecting a few models of Coppermine Celerons. I'll definitely make a few videos about Coppermine and Tualatin in the future since I have many boards to fix. I also need to cover the Tualatin mod for Slot 1.
this videos brings me good memories from my time with a pentium II 300Mhz that i increased its speed up to 450Mhz. This was on 2000 and remember so well that isolating a pin from the cpu was a really pain in the ass at that time.
@@bitsundbolts I think if the surface is clean it would be fine. What's more likely is if you keep taking it in/out it would rub away. But arguably the same can be said of the tape you used. The nail varnish is certainly quicker! I used to safely run 2.3v through my mendocinos but that had significant heat output! I would love to see you compare and overclock the Coppermine and Tualatin Celerons too. I feel their reputation is unfounded.
I do need to look at Tualatin. I need to have a look at my TUSL2-C - that board might need some repairs. I guess I should also look at the Tualatin to Coppermine mod.
In 1998, I was rocking an AMD K6-III Multimedia CPU with MMX IPU and 3DNow! FPU, OPTi 82C929 ISA Audio with Sound Blaster Vibra 16 Emulation, Internal MIDI Synth expansion and onboard Yamaha OPL3. For GPU, I had the 6MB Hercules dual card. This was the days when 3D acceleration was done on a separate card from 2D video cars. The 2D display on the Hercules was an Micronics MX chipset and the 3D card was a 3Dfx Voodoo Rush all on the PCI interface. This was a really nice budget gaming PC back in the day!
I was one of the lucky ones. Found out about this fantastic deal when I was working at Electronic Arts Canada from one of the tech services guys, and was already in the market for an upgrade from a Pentium 133 as I needed alot more power to play the upcoming MMORPG EverQuest, but as a new father, poor AF. I was able to score an Asus board and a fully overclockable Celeron 300A that ran at 450MHz right out of the gate. It was my go-to gaming rig for a LONG time.
I had one of those. It could overclock to 450 easily on an Abit BH6 1.01, with a slight undervolt (1.9V instead of 2.0). The mobo had a "turbo" feature that could add 2.5 MHz to the FSB, clocking the CPU at 462 MHz... But it was slightly unstable, so I kept it at 450 with a "fat" P-III cooler. My brother had the same setup, but his could run at 1.7V - too bad he didn't try to push it further, because that was really a golden sample ! Before I had gotten the cooler, I would instead run it with a 83 MHz FSB and a 1:1 AGP bus speed, that was a nice compromise : "AGP 2.7" and a 375 MHz Pentium II did net me some nice benchmark numbers on the Unreal castle flyby demo, all that on a rock solid system. Getting that extra cooling and cranking it up all to the max was still better, though./
Fun fact, the Intel L440GX motherboard supports the Celeron 300A... twice since it's a dual slot motherboard, and it runs them at 450MHz. It was a fun time.
@@bitsundbolts You need to drill through the back of the 300A to remove one pin from the CPU is order to run dual SMP mode. I still have both my modded slot one 300As so I could show you how.
@@bitsundbolts The Abit BP6 could also run two Celeron 300A in SMP, without any modification. Perfect rig under windows 2000 with a Voodoo Banshee 16Mb back in the days !
I need to read about this mod. Was it required to drill? Taping a contact at the edge or cutting a trace somewhere wasn't working? I guess it was a connection right under the CPU that caused dual CPUs not to work.
I did buy a 300A as soon as it was available, increased the bus frequency to 100Mhz and enjoyed Pentium II 450 speeds at a much lower price! These were the days of great overclocking.
I won the overclock lottery in July 2003 - I bought a Celeron Northwood 2.4GHz - and had a board capable of running 100 or 133 MHz with correct PCI/RAM dividers automatically - the CPU posted and ran happily at 3.2GHz (24x133MHz) for over 6 years before I retired it ;) At the time the P4 3.06GHz with HT was about A$1299 while I picked up the Celeron 2.4GHz for A$129 (SL6XG was t he s-Step). Great times :D
Wow! What a great overclocker and value for money! I always wanted the best back in the day, but now, I would prefer going the smart route and get value for money!
I@@bitsundboltsI later found a board with voltage adjustment and it was stable at 3.2GHz down to 1.392v (stock voltage 1.525v) and ran at its stock clock down to 1.04v :D
God I miss Slot 1. Folks I know at Intel said it was the absolute worst and nightmarish architecture to design and actually get working (functionally), but I loved it. It was such a "user friendly" socket and made system installation etc. so much easier.
All of us who played at quake tournaments had these setups. Usually a little extra voltage was enough to get it to 450mhz. Because we were able to essentially grab the top tier gaming performance, those machines lasted us until the AMD Athlon came out years later which was another superior boost in speeds.
I had a 300A overclocked to 450 on an Abit BH6 mothrboard and a Riva TNT2. It was the best bang for buck available in 1999. Nobody I knew ever had an issue running the 300A at 450.
I had a Celeron 300A. I also tried to overlock it, and I think it actually worked. At the time of their release, I worked near where these were made, for the company that made them. I worked in the factory that made the 440BX chipset. We made gazillions of them, because it was hard to find a better chipset to replace them.
I remember in the late 90's at the Computer market in the UK (Manchester), Celeron 300A's were sold based on their overclocking ability. The sellers would test the CPU right before your eyes so you could see exactly how it overclocked, they charged less than MSRP if the overclock failed or was poor, and they charged more than MSRP if it overclocked well. I had a 300A running at 450Mhz for 2 years (which was a long time in the late 90s as many people would upgrade twice per year or more).
Back in the day i had a 300A running at ~520mhz, peltier and water cooled with a custom water block, rad and pond pump setup. Paired with a Voodoo 2 it was an awesome gaming setup, and Unreal Tournament was played a lot!
That was my exact setup in 1998. A Mendocino 300A overclocked to 450 on an ASUS P2B motherboard. I still have it! It served me well until 2002, when I got an Athlon Thunderbird C 1400 on an ASUS A7V133 which I was also able to overclock nicely. I swapped the Thunderbird for a Athlon XP Thoroughbred 2400 which was the max the A7V133 motherboard would take sometime in early 2003. Again, a decent overclocker. I sold the A7V133 motherboard and Athlon 2400 processor on that 4 letter auction site for more money than I paid for them in 2006 and bought a Pentium D 805 and a JetWay 775GT1-LOGE. Which was a terrible mistake...
I was lucky enough to have a Socket 370 300A stepping SL36A. These were fantastic overclockers, 450mhz was easily attained. 522mhz was stable in most things for me, and I could even manage 600MHz in some applications for extended periods of time. I did have a friend with a P2 450 who really didn't believe it until he saw it!
@@bitsundbolts keep an eye out for the SL36A stepping Malaysian built Mendocino, could be great content for a future video! I'd happily send you one but I'm in Australia, shipping might cost more than the processor!
I had a friend who used to brag about his "300A" with 128kb cache....it was a good CPU, i remember playing Mario 64 (project 64), good performance...good times....dial-up connection :(
In 1999 I have slot 1 Acorp mobo with 440BX chipset and Celeron 400Mhz s370 in ppga-slot1 adapter. This cpu just easily overclocked to 500-550 Mhz by increasing the FSB. Good old days😊
One of the first things that company OCZ did was to buy a whole lot of C300A and to test and bin them - and sell the ones that were guaranteed to 450 (or above).
I got lucky in the silicon lottery and got my C300A to run wit a FSB of 113 Mhz stable. It was substantially faster than my best friends P2 450... I miss those days... Another good overclocker was my dirt cheap Pentium D 805 which ran at 3.9 GHz
Speaking of silicon lottery, I remember buying a LGA775 1.8ghz Celeron D and overclocking that thing to the moon 😅. I recall getting scared at around 2.8ghz (I think) and stopping because it was still mostly stable. Put on a tower cooler and that was the best bang for buck *ever*
I had a Celeron 300 running at 450 for several years. It was so stable I never needed to worry about it. If it ever crashed, it wasn’t because of the overclock. I ran Windows 95, 98, NT 4, and 2000 Professional on it, sometimes with a month or more of uptime (especially on Windows 2000), just because I could. I later upgraded the CPU to a Celeron 566 (with slot-to-socket adaptor) and ran it at 850, IIRC (might have been a 533 at 800-it’s been a long time). In any case, it worked just as well as the 300 at 450 for as long as I had it (until I upgraded to Pentium 4). Good CPUs for cheap, those P2-based Celerons were.
I used to have a Celeron 300A cpu in the late 90s/early 2000s clocked to 450mhz with any issues. Performance was amazing. If I remember correctly the motherboard was from QDI.
I had a Celeron 333A back in the day. It was rockstable on an Asus P2B with capton mod with only 2.2V (!) @ 550 Mhz Paired with two voodoo2 SLI it was heaven on earth for me ;)
First P2 Celeron 266, the L2 cache-less one, was awesome deal! I bought one put it on a BX motherboard and ran it at 400MHz. L2 cache made very little difference back then by the way. It performed basically the same as the P2 400MHz. I actually tested both as I had P2 400MHz at work.
Back in the day I had a Celeron A 333MHz on an Asus P2B-F mobo (Intel BX440 chipset). After playing with jumpers it ran at 450MHz and stock cooler without any issues. But, as I was afraid of toasting the CPU, I've turned it down to 400MHz. Wonderful days when Riva TNT had 16 megs of VRAM and 64MB of system RAM was all you needed to play all of them fresh games. Cheers!
Nice memory lane :) I remember selling hundreds of those CPU 300A on computers or for parts too. All Computers equiped with those CPU were already OC to 450MHz / 100MHz by me in the shop. Then installed Windows, drv, apps, etc. And voila another customer happyy to have saved lot of money. We didnt do that for companies or only a few that asked for it because of pro apps used at that moment that needed ultra stable PC and new SSE instruction or more cache. Funy thing is I dont remember any of those CPU / computer not booting at 450Mhz / 100MHz fsb. and not a single customer complaining about stability. Maybe we were lucky ? :) Anyway, good work as always sir !
Uh, my Celeron must be an odd sample then. I should try it on different boards in the future, to see if it may be related to my P2B. Oh, and thanks for watching!
@@bitsundbolts pleasure is mine :) let us know about different MB. I remember we tried to stick to P2B or P2B variant (L, DLS, etc) or a bit cheaper but same result even OC : DFI P2XBL. I also had that exelent P2XBLD (dual CPU). for awhile working on NT4.0 and SETI app 24H :)
Not just the 300a, you had to get this special cooler called the "alpha" that was this hefty aluminum thing that had two 80mm fans. It was the first aftermarket cooler I ever got. Paired with a GeForce 2 ultra and 512mb of ram, it was by far the most awesome PC I ever had and the only time I ever managed to have something top of the line when it was still top of the line
I'm so old that I can't remember if I had one of these and overclocked it to 450 mhz, or I had a Celeron 450 and tried overclocking it to 600mhz (or something). I do remember trying to play Falcon 4.0 on "it" in the summer heat with the case off and a desk fan pointed right at the motherboard, all while sitting there in my underwear since it was so hot. Those were the days(?)
In 1999 my friend Vern built a 300A OC box and it was great. Unfortunately I couldn't afford build a new PC till 2000 when I built a K6-2 550 Mhz for W2K.
I found a socket 370 system back in 2007 with a Celeron Mendocino 366MHz. Had a Diamond voodoo 2 card 12mb. I slapped a Geforce MX200 PCI and 256mb ram. Ran windows XP pretty good. I let my mom have it for a couple of years until I replaced with a gaming rig I had. Then when I went to college in 2009 I donated that motherboard and CPU for them to teach things with it.
I remember emulators particularly worked so much better with the 300A running at 450mhz. I sweated a bit adding the voltage to get my 300A up to 450 but it was very stable and the gaming improvements where obvious.
Around that exact time I needed to build a superfast multithreaded data processing machine. Brought the dual slot P2B (p4b?) and three C300's. I then did the SMP hack (drilling out pin's and doing a link or two on each cart). I ended up with a dual 450 and a spare 450, they all took 450. The machine flew and rock solid for years. On a few others I eventually brought I had to lift the core voltage a smidge on some. - great times!
I ran dual Celeron slot 1 processors by performing the BGA ball backdrill mod to enable SMP. I stuck with that system for many, many years as it just ran so well.
@@bitsundbolts The article gave pretty clear instructions on what size drill bit to use and how to locate the exact spot to drill on the backside, but the solder balls were pretty big back then compared to today. I used white rubber clic eraser refills to snug the Celerons into the PII brackets. But yes, it was a huge gamble at the time with a big payoff, and it worked!
We had a PII-350 running 472mhz on an Abit BH-6 (the OG software overclocking board); with a Diamond Viper TNT2 Ultra with a Peltier on it running 250mhz! Replaced the PII with a P3 @ 733 and ran 933mhz, then upgraded to dual P3 @ 933's!
I got my first PC as a hand-me-down in 2006, it has a Celeron 333MHz, Diamond Micronics C400 (BCM QS440BX) and Diamond Viper V550. I was a kid so I didn't know anything about overclocking, though even if I did the motherboard wouldn't have been optimal for that. I'm sure by 2006 there would have been a plenty of Pentium III's on the used market but of course due to me being a kid upgrading the CPU wasn't an option. And Coppermine support would have required swapping the 1M ROM to a 2M ROM. We did also have Pentium II 300MHz (Klamath) + Rage Pro AGP and K6-2 400MHz + GeForce2 MX systems in use in the mid to late 2000s
I have a HP Vectra with a Celeron 333Mhz that I rescued from a dumpster a number of years ago. It's a charming little system and is pretty good for basic retro DOS/Win95 gaming. One day I'll put it back in service I'm sure.
Ha! I rescued an HP Vectra VL Series 4 a couple of weeks ago! It is Socket 7 though, but it had a creative sound blaster in it. I need to restore it since it is still untouched so far...
I lost my first job (tech in a PC shop) because of this processor. I explained to the co-owner that the 300A was so fast because it had it's cache on the die. He claimed that the SMD passives on PCB were cache memory 😁
4:10 Both of your displayed Slot-1 Celerons have the on-chip cache. The cache-less version had a very distinct look having a smaller metal heat spreader, leaving some spacing to the pins. Google "hardware museum celeron 300" for the image. It could be that your "Covington" is a later release, a binned-down version of Mendocino with L2 cache tested inoperational and factory-disabled.
I must have won the silicon lottery with mine. Not only was it rock-solid at 450 MHz, but I could get into Windows at 540 MHz on stock voltage. It wasn't fully stable at that speed, but it ran. Dialing it back to 504 MHz was pretty much the sweet spot.
