Celeron Benchmarks

Unreal / GLQuake / Quake 2 / Sin Demo v1

Firstly a warm welcome to you if you came here after reading the overclocking article in the Xmas PCZone. It has generated a lot of interest in this site. Just for you I've put together a specific article on Overclocking Celerons. Hopefully, even those of you who've never even taken the cover off your machine should be able to follow it. If you want to see what else is on this site, take a look via the main page.

I've had my Celeron 266 running at 400 MHz for a few months now - its been superb for a sub £100 processor. Now its successor has come along, the Celeron 300A. The 300A includes 128kb of Level 2 cache, whereas the Celeron 266 has none. However this cache runs at the same speed as the processor, rather than on a conventional P2 which runs at half speed. The new Celeron is multiplier locked at 4.5 which means when coupled with a BX board with 100 MHz Front Side Bus it will operate at 450Mhz. In many situations this chip will outperform a genuine P2 450 thanks to its 'special' cache feature. All this horsepower needs to be backed up by some serious 3D hardware. On this page I've got my benchmarks for both single Voodoo 2 and the Matrox G200. If you want to see what two Voodoo 2 cards together are capable of then please visit my  SLI benchmarks page.

System Spec 1:

Abit BX6 motherboard (EG Bios), Intel Celeron 266 (Boxed retail SL2QG Costa Rica), 128Mb Micron Tech PC100 SDRAM (rated up to 125Mhz), Orchid Righteous 3d II 12Mb, IBM Deskstar 8.5Gb UDMA HD, SB AWE64 Value, Matrox Millennium G200, and plenty of other stuff insignificant to performance. It's all crammed into a Supermicro case which has excellent airflow.

System Spec 2:

As system 1 but with Intel Celeron 300A (SL2WM oem Costa Rica) Bios set to 2.4v core voltage. I took the heatsink fan off my 266 to perform these tests. I also purchased a twin fan cooler from Computernerd but found that it was causing my machine to crash. Unsure as to why but am guessing that it was some sort of electrical interference rather than heat.

How the Benchmarks were run - System 1:

All benchmarks were performed with the Celeron 266 clocked at 412Mhz and the Voodoo 2 Clocked at 98Mhz. This has been totally stable without a single crash. I have been able to clock the Celeron to 448, but this apparently 'killed' some LGS (Goldstar) PC100 Ram, so haven't tried it again since. Note that my R3D2 is one of the models with mixed 83Mhz RAM maybe this is why I'm not having a problem overclocking it?

How the Benchmarks were run - System 2:

As above with Celeron 300A clocked at 450Mhz, Voodoo2 at 98Mhz

Each test was run 5 times, and an average gained from these results. As well as the average I've posted the highest and lowest times gained.

Unreal

Using Timedemo02 from Planetunreal, Default install with MTMU DLL (GlideDrv.DLL) obtained from 3Fingers. Vsync disabled, high quality textures, high quality sound.

Resolution

Low FPS High FPS Average FPS
640x480

41.98

51.94

42.60

52.46

42.21

52.26

800x600

34.26

37.50

34.76

38.10

34.46

37.82

.

Celeron 266 @ 412 MHz

.

Celeron 300A @ 450 MHz

Note that the high/low FPS figures are for the overall result, not that reported by Timedemo. As Unreal is frame capped, the max FPS rate during timing will always be 64.0 (Unless you have a slower set-up). The MTMU DLL improves my 800x600 performance by up to 8fps.Scores were taken from the 'last cycle' display. Note: it is very important when using the Timedemo utility to issue commands from the command line (default is on the TAB key) rather than the console. With the console open, frame rate can double. I have also tried Unreal using the Celeron clocked at 464 with 2nd Level Cache disabled. This results in a drop of 3fps at 800x600 over cache enabled at 450.

 

GLQuake

Demo1 Using GLQuake 0.97 default install, Vsync disabled.

Resolution Low FPS High FPS Average FPS
640x480

114.6

116.5

114.6

116.5

114.6

116.5

800x600

74.9

75.6

75.0

75.6

75.0

75.6

Demo2 Using GLQuake 0.97 default install, Vsync disabled.

Resolution Low FPS High FPS Average FPS
640x480

111.1

112.2

111.2

112.3

111.1

112.2

800x600

72.5

73.1

72.5

73.1

72.5

73.1

.

Celeron 266 @ 412 MHz

.

Celeron 300A @ 450 MHz

Quake2

NOTE: These are without any tweaks. Much higher figures can be reached using 3Fingers tweak guide.

Demo1 Using default install and patched all the way to 3.19. Vsync disabled.

Resolution Low FPS High FPS Average FPS
640x480

81.8

90.7

82.1

91.4

82.0

91.1

800x600

64.0

65.9

65.1

66.5

64.8

66.5

Massive1 Using default install and patched all the way to 3.19. Vsync disabled.

Resolution Low FPS High FPS Average FPS
640x480

70.7

80.5

70.8

80.6

70.8

80.6

800x600

54.6

57.3

55.3

57.3

55.0

57.3

.

Celeron 266 @ 412 MHz

.

Celeron 300A @ 450 MHz

Note: the FPS figures I published prior to September 20th were with a slightly modified config and were slightly faster then those above. These new figures were run after renaming my Q2 cfg files to remove the tweaks.

 

SiN Demo v0.90

Killer.dm2 Default install using another benchmarking demo from 3Fingers.

Resolution Low FPS High FPS Average FPS
640x480

43.9

55.0

43.9

55.9

43.9

55.6

800x600

38.4

42.2

38.5

42.3

38.5

42.2

.

Celeron 266 @ 412 MHz

.

Celeron 300A @ 450 MHz

 

Matrox G200 Performance

In its current form the G200 is no match for the Voodoo 2 when coupled with a fast processor. At the moment, the only way to run GlQuake and Quake 2 engine with hardware acceleration is with DirectX 6 and the OpenGL Wrapper. I downloaded  the wrapper from the Matroxusers website. Soon Matrox should release a full OpenGL implementation for the G200, then we should start to see some improvement in performance.

GLQuake Demo1

Resolution FPS

640x480

41.3 55.1
800x600
36.6 36.8

Quake 2 Massive1

Resolution FPS

640x480

34.1 34.9
800x600
29.4 29.9

SiN Demo v0.90 Killer

Resolution FPS

640x480

23.5 30.4
800x600
20.3 22.9

.

Celeron 266 @ 412 MHz

.

Celeron 300A @ 450 MHz

In terms of frame rate the G200 is quite disappointing when compared to the Voodoo 2. However the visual quality is noticeably better. Hopefully performance will improve with driver support. The other advantage is to run at higher resolutions, but at the moment it's really only good for screen grabs. As I only purchased this card as a replacement for my old ATI Mach 64, 3D is not a major concern. The Voodoo does that beautifully.

 

Useful Links

Well there's no way I could have worked out how to do any of this overclocking business on my own. Here's a quick run down of useful sites to get you started.

Tom's Hardware Guide - An excellent place to start, make sure you read through the Delphi message forum too.
Anandtech - Covers everything that Tom's does. Never hurts to have an alternate view.
BX Boards Page - Formerly the Unofficial Abit BX6 page. Essential reading.
3Fingers - Numerous tools and benchmarking utilities. Home of the Quake tweaking guides.
3dfx.products.voodoo2 newsgroup. One of the busiest of all newsgroups - read it regularly.


If you want any more info then feel free to e-mail me. If you saved this page and want to come back: http://www.gribbsy.demon.co.uk is the place to go.