Ryan Gets His CeleMine 566 to 935 MHz

Hey gang, you may remember me from my caffeine-induced rants, raves, and ramblings last January – I’m back home from school for the Summer and ready for a couple more months of overclocking madness. I’m currently running two x86 systems at home – you don’t want to overclock a Sun UltraSPARC, trust me – and one of them is upstairs in my bedroom.

It’s serving an image for my site‘s webcam and it’s currently running Windows 2000 Professional. Linux still hasn’t ironed out the USB issues I need fixed for my 3Com PC Digital Camera, so it’s a going to be a Wintel world for a while. If you’re experienced with USB configurations under Linux, please let me know!

Up until last week, I had an AOpen AX63 Pro motherboard in there, 64MB Micron PC100, and a P III 450 SL35D @ 600MHz, cooling courtesy of an Alpha P3125. Uptimes for that machine averaged about four weeks. Last Saturday at a computer show I picked up a Celeron 2 “Celemine” 566 chip. It’s Malaysia, SL46T, OEM. I came home and broke out my trusty BX6 Rev. 2 board and an Abit Slotket III. Within a few minutes I’m set up as follows:

• Celeron II 566
• Alpha PAL35T w/ Sanyo Denki fan
• 64MB Micron PC100 SDRAM
• Abit BX6 Rev. 2 motherboard, latest BIOS
• D-link DFE-530TX NIC
• Old SB16 ISA Sound Card (gotta have the MP3’s, so they’re served over the home LAN from my machine in the basement)
• Diamond V550 16MB Riva TNT AGP

• Western Digital WD21000 hard drive – darn PIO mode!

I installed Win 2000 at a speed of 850 MHz (8.5*100), and once everything was up and running, I started to play. After an hour or so of tweaking, I ended up at 953 MHz (8.5*112) at 1.8 volts (0.3 over default for this chip). It’s rock stable and performs very well.

I’m puzzled as to comments like these from Dean, to be honest. I thought the chip performed very well, based on both overclockability and flat-out performance. These are SiSoft benchmarks (the P III machine is my other x86 machine, a P III 500 @ 700 – 702, actually, [5.0*140.5] with the Intel retail heatsink, Soyo 6BA+ IV motherboard, and 256MB Micron PC133).

Under Sandra, you see the CII @ 700 (83*8.5) holds tight with the PIII 700, and really takes off at 953. I suppose Sandra isn’t very cache-intensive. I just can’t understand statements like “the darn thing just can’t compute its way out of a wet paper sack.” The Celeron II performs very well on my machine. Just go in remembering that it has only half the L2 of a regular CuMine chip – there’s no doubt it makes a difference in games or applications like SETI. Let’s have a look at some pictures:

I don’t really need exceptional memory here, as it’s only being run at 112 MHz – but why not? CAS 2 here I come. No problems with 222 @ 112 MHz – and I’ve had this stuff at around 125 @ 222 and 150 @ 333. I love Micron.

I’m very happy with this Sanyo Denki fan. Plycon offers them bundled with their PAL35T units – CFM airflow is a bit less than the Y.S. Tech 26CFM units, but it’s infinitely quiter. Notice the grill to prevent horrible, bloody finger accidents 🙂

Just a couple shots of the CPU, slotket, cooler, and memory on the board. No problems at all, even with the oversized cooler – there’s more space than I know what to do with between the Slot 1 SC242 connector and the DIMM slots.

This is a small part of an image of the distributed.net client, which measures linear CPU calculations. I have zero faith in the SETI@home program – its founders refuse to put out timely updates to its client programs and its website. If they ever get their act together, I’ll participate. Distributed.net is on top of things, so that’s who I run with.

Anyway, at 953MHz the chip does 2.68 megakeys per second (in comparison, a Katmai P III 450 does around 1.24, and my CuMine 700 does 1.97). The 2.68 figure, that’s with the client not even using all of the CPU’s cycles – I have Webcam32 installed to serve an image for the live cam every 30 seconds.

And now for the obligatory WCPUID screenshot…pretty straightforward. All in all, I’ve got to say I’m very happy with this chip. The SenFu water cooling package is sounding pretty good to me right now, so maybe I’ll pick one up and try to take this thing past 1 GHz.

I think the Celeron II is an excellent value for the money and holds its own again regular CuMine chips – though it’s common sense that it won’t be as fast as a regular CuMine. If you’re a gamer, or someone who demands every last ounce of performance out of a unit, go for a regular CuMine with 256KB L2 (like I’ll be doing next month for my other x86 machine) – but, like I said, this is only my webcam machine. It kicks butt at distributed.net RC5 and is stable as anything at 953 MHz.

Ryan Yadsko