Celeron FCPGA 533 MHz

SUMMARY:

• Overclocking Nostalgia March 2000: Remember the good old C300A? Did 450 out of the box.
• Overclocking Nostalgia March 2002: Remember the good old FCPGA C 533? Did 800 out of the box.

And that about says it. By sheer luck, we got to play with an engineering sample of the about to be released Celeron FCPGA 533 MHz CPU. It is sweet. This baby runs at 1.5 volts because it is a 66 MHz part. We found that to run it stable at 100 MHz, you have to increase the voltage to at least 1.65 volts – coincidentally (?) the same voltage for the PIII 600E running at 800 MHz. Note closely the multiplier – 8x.

Depending on the motherboard, voltage may vary – we had to increase it to 1.9 volts on a slotket with the SOYO +IV. On the MSI 6309, I could run at 800 MHz at 1.65 volts.

The pics below show something interesting:

Not much news here – except for the labeling, it looks like a PIII.

Hello! What have we here? Look closely at the back – there’s some missing parts! It would appear that the circumcision takes place after birth, not during. The pic below clearly shows “the scene of the crime”:

Pure speculation on my part, but if I were Intel and I make all my chips exactly the same (as they have done in the past), then making Celerons out of PIIIs happens on the flip chip circuitry, NOT on the die. The so-what is this is truly a PIII with half its cache disabled…the same PIIIs that overclock so well.

In our testing, the Celeron performs pretty much like a PIII except for lower scores for CPU Mark – a clear indication of the half-cache penalty. However, SI-Sandra benches were almost indistinguishable from a PIII running at 800 MHz. The following table outlines what we found:

All tests with PC133, CAS2 RAM, CPUs running at 800 MHz.

The half-cache penalty shows clearly in CPU Mark32 results on the SOYO+IV, both chips running at 800 MHz:

PIII 600 E: 2260
FCPGA  533: 1330

These test used an ALPHA PEP66 for cooling – the Celeron ran at about 100F under stress, so cooling is going to be extremely important in achieving stability at 800MHz and beyond.

CONCLUSION:

Engineering samples are not production run CPUs, but they are not off the mark either. Everything we know to date indicates that the Celeron FCPGAs are going to breathe a new life into the zillions of BX boards that are ripe for CPU Upgrades. However, the high multipliers on these Celerons (533MHz = 8x) could mean that the Celeron FCPGA 533 is the “chip of choice”. In addition, super-cooling a C533 may push this chip into the 900s. This is going to be fun!