Celeron 420 vs A64 vs Sempron

[joefriday]

wow. Functional speed step after pin mod. Weird.

GOOD FOR YOU!!!

Time for a re-review of gaming prowess, no?

 

[pauldh]

I can't explain the speedstep either; mobo related I guess. Just happy it's all working so well. I spent quite a few hours using and gaming with this rig last night, and all is well. I may even buy a spare one of these mobo's while they are still $20 AR. (new rebate now). Although it would be a spare for me... I'd never sell a system with this in it of course. I'd be better off going with higher quality matx though. Maybe a 780G mobo.

Time for a re-review of gaming prowess, no?

Yeah, I'm kicking myself for not documenting more testing at 1.6GHz. I really didn't expect the pin mod to work with this mobo. I enjoy comparisons and it would have been nice to have done before/after testing. I would like to have compared it to the Athlon XP @ 2500+ and 3200+ also. And I may someday compare this to a single core A64 system to see how it compares now (if/when time allows). I will say, TDU is now playable at least. NFS Carbon no sweat at 10x7 max details without motion blur.

 

[KyleSTL]

My dad has a Celeron 420 as a temporary CPU until the Q9450 comes out, I can affirm with a P35-DS4 it does indeed have functional speedstep. It's lapped and has a lapped TRU on top of it. How rediculous.

 

[pauldh]

KyleSTL, is he overclocking with that lapped setup? Is that gigabyte mobo one that won't work at 1066 with the bsel pin mod?

 

[KyleSTL]

Not sure. He's OC'd it to 2.2Ghz IIRC. I think it tops out with Orthos 1Hr at ~32°C. I cannot attest to the BSEL mod, though. He's using it as an uber-HTPC rig (edit: when the Q9450 comes in). All the fans [in the Antec 900 case] are 800rpm Slipstreams (5) with the 200mm fan on low. It's totally inaudible with 2 WD GP drives (500 and 1TB). He has a BD/HD combo drive, so I imagine that's what he'll be spending the majority of his time doing in the coming months. With the [slightly] overclocked C420 and a Sapphire 2600XT with an Accelero S1 it plays BD movies flawlessly, but for some reason has trouble with BD/HD concerts (audio flooding the processor?). FYI, since you might be using yours as an HTPC.

Edit: He also has an X-Fi card and runs Vista Ultimate 32 with 4GB DDR2 800 ram.

 

[pauldh]

That Sounds very nice. Part of the reason I stopped pushing chips to their limit on air was I grew tired of noisy fans. I almost bought the 900 myself for the rig in my sig, but then decided to just use a Sonata II I had in stock.

Yeah, no need for the mod if the mobo OC's it without. If he needed the mod, he would top out at 220 bus or so (1.76 GHZ). He's at about 275 Mhz bus to hit 2.2 GHz. With the right ram settings and maybe a little more voltage, he should get way past 2.2GHz if he wanted to.

 

[KyleSTL]

He's obviously not pushing it hard, it was basically "Dad, set your FSB to [275]". Ok, now save and exit. No need to squeeze every last mhz out of the chip since it's only temporary. I think next time I'm home I may dig into it with him and see if we can hit 3.0 without a voltage bump. He's never overclocked before and this is his first home-built. I talked him out of giving Dell $2000 and he's extremely happy with the computer (even with that wimpy processor). He said he'd never buy a pre-built ever again. Kyle 1 Dell 0.

 

[joefriday]

Well Paul....I simply couldn't resist. I caved and bought a DIRT CHEAP Celeron 420, complimented by an open box Biostar board, and 1 GB of cheap DDR2. Total cost with shipping is a bit under $90. I know open box is a bit risky, so we shall see. I've got an older 120 GB Seagate sata1 hdd, and a PATA DVD burner, along with a 250 watt psu and a Dell 4600 case to shove it all into (the K6-2 is going bye bye). Should make for a nice little rig, but damn if I know what I'm going to do with it! Let's see this Celeron dance at 333fsb!

http://www.microcenter.com/single_product_results.phtml?product_id=0260900
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813138095R
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820161675

Nice eh? I should have it all by the start of next week.

 

[KyleSTL]

Let us know how the 200->333 [pad] mod goes. That FSB is a bit high for stock cooling, but if you have a Hyper TX2 or something (just to be on the cheap), should be doable.

 

[pauldh]

Hey good deal. I'd like to know your 333bus results too. At 266, it's still not much of a gaming chip, but it's been 100% stable on the puny lil Intel low profile cooler even.

 

[KyleSTL]

2.166Ghz is relatively easy on stock with any sample of the 420. I think you'd need a 1:1000 (odds) chip to have stability at 2.66Ghz on stock cooling regardless of voltage.

 

[pauldh]

^ True. But you have to remember, I have a $20 motherboard too.

 

[KyleSTL]

I wasn't putting your efforts down. I was simply stating it's not likely to get FSB1333 with a simple pad mod.

 

[pauldh]

Yup, gotcha. I agree on the 333 bus and am eager to hear how it goes.

I thought it was a comment about me saying 266 is 100% stable, which I wanted to clarify that I am happy about because of the el cheapo mobo, not because it's anything amazing for the cpu.

 

[KyleSTL]

So what's the word, joe? I'm wondering if you got that puppy to fire up at 2.66ghz.

As the side story that I brought up about my dad's computer:
He got the Q9450 and has been running for a couple weeks now, and this weekend I showed him how to overclock so now he's got 4 cores @ 3.2ghz in his dead-silent rig. His temps at stock volts with two Orthos running are 63, 55, 55, 57 - so I believe his IHS is quite convex, but not worth the risk of lapping a $360 CPU. It's way more processing power than I think he'll ever need, but hey, that's what I think we all said when 1Ghz processors were announced (or many things well before that - on-die cache, MMX, DX2 etc).

I contemplated stealing the C420 from him to make a new HTPC (currently AXP2400+, 1GB, FX5200), but decided against it because the AMD 780 chipset is so tempting, and I wanna do it right.

 

[joefriday]

Nice overclock on that quad. I bet your dad will love it.

I agree about going AMD for an HTPC. They seem to have all the nice features right now. Personally though, wait till the new AMD IGP debuts with even better hybrid graphics support. Also, that Nvidia 8200 igp seems pretty decent too.

Now, as for my stuff. I just got the mobo in today. The ram arrived last Thursady. I'm still waiting on the Celeron. Should be here tomorrow. I used the old D 805 to test, and it seems good to go. I just checked for basic functionality though: fan control, S3 standby, Ethernet, USB, both ram slots, IGP, all the sata ports and the IDE, and audio. I could have tried a 133 to 166 fsb overclock on the Pentium D, but I wasn't going to push my luck on this board. I consider the fact that I didn't encounter any major problems a minor victory in itself. One thing though, the mobo didn't come with anything, not even the I/O shield. I know Newegg makes no guarantee about those items, but I also know that sometimes such things are included. I'll just make my own I/O shield. Everything else isn't needed anyway. Anyway, not bad so far for a 1333 fsb capable board for $31 shipped. Apparently it also supports 45nm CPUs. One thing I noticed was that the IGP was incredibly warm with that tiny heatsink. I'm definitely looking into putting a small fan on that thing.

I may not have time to test this board with the Celeron 420 tomorrow. But if I do, I'll let your know how it goes.

 

[joefriday]

Pin mod was successful. Luckily the Celeron came with a relatively high stock vcore of 1.28. I'm glad the Biostar board took to pin mods, as the bios overclocks could only carry the cpu to 1066 fsb. Overclocking past 2.66 GHz/333 fsb was limited, with a max of 2960 MHz/370 fsb at 1.4 vcore (boot to windows, did not test for stability).

Idle temp (core) at stock 1.6 GHz was 40C, the same as when overclocked to 2.66 GHz. Load temp at 2.66 GHz was 56C, tested using Windows Movie Maker. System Idle power consumption at 1.6 GHz was 51 watts. System idle power consumption at 2.66 GHz was 53 watts. System load power consumption at 2.66 GHz was 68 watts using Windows Movie Maker. Unfortunately, I could not get speed step working with this combo. 🙁

Although the pin mod is a success, I plan to put this cpu back to 1.6 GHz, and severly undervolt the processor to around 1.1 vcore, which should put the idle power consumption in the 40s with cpu load consumption in the 50s, probably with a core temp in the low 30s. I definitely don't need the power, and the D 805 still trumps this CPU in terms of encoding and multitasking. This combo will live out its days performing mundane tasks.

Pics for your enjoyment:

Interesting thing about the temps: I used the stock Celeron cooler. Core temps of 56C would have you believe the heatsink would at least be a little warm. This is not true. Heatsink felt cool the whole time. In fact the CPU itself was cool to the touch when I removed it from the mobo immediately after running it for a couple hours. Definitely not the same observations I get with the D 805.

BTW, all testing was done in an open air environment. Expect temps to rise about 5C idle and load when once inside a case.

 

[joefriday]

Some more observations:
The Nvidia IGP is really good. It performs THE SAME as my GF3 ti200. Nice.

The idle power consumption of the Nvidia IGP is very close to that of Intel's 865G (extreme Graphics 2). That's amazing, considering how much more powerful the Nvidia IGP is.

Undervolting the Celeron 420 is a waste of time. At 1.0 vcore 1.6 GHz, I dropped a measily 6 watts off the idle power consumption as compared to 2.66 GHz overclock at stock 1.28 vcore. Running the CPU at stock speeds seems to affect the IGP more than I thought it would. Appearantly, the IGP likes either higher bus speeds or more CPU clocks, as an overclock back up to 2.13 Ghz yields a consistent 2-3 fps increase in games.

The IGP loves memory bandwith. This I assumed going in, as the poor thing is only a single channel design. Overclocking the ram to DDR 800 gets another 1-2 fps in games.

The Biostar Bios is highly tweakable, and even allows for overclocking of the IGP's core clock. Default for the Intel version of the 7050 is 500 MHz. I brought it up to 630 MHz (the stock clock speed for the high end 7150 version of this IGP), which netted an additional 1-2 fps.

The stock hsf of the Celeron is perfect, as it's just a bit taller than the heatsink for the 7050/610i chipset directly below, so the cpu fan is able to cool both the CPU and the chipset quite effectively. Prior testing using the D 805 showed the chipset running hot, because the taller hfs prevented adequate airflow from reaching the chipset. The Celeron hsf comes with a non-pwm fan (only a 3 pin), which runs at a constant 2000 rpm. That's actually a good thing, as a slow spinning pwm fan doesn't push enough air to keep the chipset cool (I used the d 805's pwm fan on the Celeron heatsink to test).

 

[pauldh]

Thx for sharing your findings. Decent results for a bargain chip. I'm kinda surprised that low profile cooler did so well.

 

[joefriday]

I just wanted to update that I finally got "speedstep" working on this Celeron CPU, using my old Asrock 775i65g. I guess the Biostar mobo was the limitation in that regard. The ironic thing is, speedstep is actually wasting energy, as it ups the vcore whenever it drops to the 6x multi (1.1-1.2vcore, instead of the 1.0vcore I've pinmodded). If I hadn't messed with the cpu, then this feature would have been beneficial, but as it stands right now, I can save more energy by turning it off. I've since learned that this speedstep-like feature is known as "Enhanced Halt State", or C1E. How it differs from EIST, is in the fact the EIST is demand-based, using multiple levels of multis and VIDs based on CPU load, while C1E is more like an on/off switch, switching to low multi/low VID only when the CPU is absolutely at idle. The moment the CPU gets even a bit of activity, it switches up to default multi/VID. I guess you could call it "speedstep-lite".

 

[schiba]

I build a simillar sistem from spare and second hand parts(the mobo) just for fun:
asus p5pl2, 2X512 ddr2, nvidia 7200 gs, ibm deskstar 40gb, 250 w power suply
and i used it for several days. It's so quiet, a nice change from the 3 fan case and the 8800.
It scored 2700 in 3dmark 2003(more than my 5 year old a64 2800+ati 9000pro, wich was noisy).
Did i mention how cheap it was.