Thinkpads Forum

Hi, I am trying to put 2 old machines together and I have to determine which motherboard to use. One is a PII-300mmx with 512K L2 cache and the other is a PII-366 celeron with 128K L2 cache. I know Celeron is a cheap version of a PII. Just wondering would the extra speed makes up the difference in the cache size.

By the way, other than the CPU differeneces, the rest are identical. They are from I-series 2611-411 and 2611-412 machines.

Thanks for any opinion.

For most part the non-celeron processor will be significantly faster even though the clock speed is slower.

The cache size of non-celeron is 4 times that of Celeron, that will create quite a performance gap. This results is Celeron being almost equivalent to half fo the clock speed of full sized pentium II processor.

I will stick to pentium II 300 rather than Celeron 366

You're jumping the gun a little bit. The Pentium II has 4 times the cache but the Celeron has the cache running at full speed, so the Celeron will run faster at first, but once that cache is full, it will run slower. Which CPU you want really depends on what you plan to do with the laptop. If you plan to run a newer operating system such as 2000 or XP, or maybe even Linux, I'd go with the Pentium II. If you plan to run 95 or 98, I'd pick the Celeron.

I know that in the desktop world, both early PIIs as well as early Celerons both had L2 cache running at half the speed of the processor. If this is also true for the notebook versions, then I would also be inclined to select the PII 300 (with 512K) over the Cel 366 (with 128K).

In the desktop world, all Pentium II's had 512kb of half-speed off die cache mounted outside the chip on the cartridge. The Celeron 266 and 300 had no L2 cache and the Celeron 300A and up included 128kb of on-die full speed cache.

The Celeron 300A and up would outperform the equivalant Pentium II up front but once the cache is full, the PII begins to pull ahead.

Saying one chip is better than the other in this case is like saying a Ford F Series is better than a Ford Taurus. One can't be better than the other because they were meant for two different things and when doing what they were designed for, they run at full efficency. We'll compare the PII to the F series, it can handle a higher load, so if oyu plan to do anything on your laptop that might be taxing to the CPU, go with the PII. The Celeron is comparable to the Taurus, it's designed for everyday tasks. If all you ever plan to do is run Office and surf the web, maybe play a few games here or there, then the Celeron would be the better choice.

Since the two different mainboards you have both use the same chipset, I'd reccomend installing Windows and get it set up to how you'll be using it on a daily basis, then try running on one board, then the other, and whichever one performs better will be what you keep. Of course, that's if you have the time, if you don't, you'll just have to consider what I said and make your decision based on your planned usage. The Celeron runs faster but the Pentium II takes a heavier load.

Hi,

Thanks for all the inputs and opinions. I put up this machine mainly is for my wife checking her emails and surfing the Web. So, there won't be much gamimg and CPU-intense applications. Also, I will install 160MB ram (128 + 32) plus Windows 98SE. I am not sure Win XP would work or not.

I think I will experiment Celeron for 1 week, then switch to PII for another week and see how they perform. By the way, these machines are very easy to take apart and re-assemble and mos of all it is fun too.

Just one more question. is it possible to upgrade the video ram, it has 2.5M and is using Neomagic Magicmedia. More ram would certainly helps.

AlphaKilo470 wrote:In the desktop world, all Pentium II's had 512kb of half-speed off die cache mounted outside the chip on the cartridge. The Celeron 266 and 300 had no L2 cache and the Celeron 300A and up included 128kb of on-die full speed cache.

Man I would have bet you $50 that this is wrong. But--> I just went on Intel's site and you are 100.000% correct.

I learn something new every day!

the celeron 366 had quite a reputation among overclockers in it's day.
it's actually likely that it will run well at 400 or 433 , more is unlikely in a notebook because the additional cooling needed is difficult to achieve.
if course it's your call whether you want to monkey with that but if you have a whole extra board and proscessor you have little to lose!

What the Celeron A's taught us is that the megahertz are alot less relevant than most would think. Once people started to notice this, Celerons became extremely popular in home and office settings. Intel, when they saw increasing popularity of their budget Celerons, they got nervous and were afriad that Celeron sales were infringing on Pentium sales, so instead of improving the high priced Pentium's, they decided to slow the Celeron down by keeping the cache at 128k and the bus speed at 66mhz until late 2000 or early 2001. This is probably why the Celeron is not held in such high regard today as it was in 1999 and early 2000.

bigboy0723 wrote:Hi,
Just one more question. is it possible to upgrade the video ram, it has 2.5M and is using Neomagic Magicmedia. More ram would certainly helps.

Unfortunatly, no, the only way to upgrade the video is by replacing the system board. I don't think you'll have to much too worry about however because the 2.5mb will still alow the video card to display more colors than the LCD is capable of, so you should be fine unless you plan on playing any games.

Hi,

I finally put back my "project" with the Celeron monthboard. It all works fine except one thng.

Just after I installed the OS (WIN 98SE) , drivers and utilities , all downloaded from IBM website. I can adjusted the LCD brightness both from the Notebook Manager and from the keyboard. But once I power off the machine and came back some time. I can't adjust the brightness.

I tried a few fixes, such as reseated the LCD cable, checked all the connections, checked the BIOS and even exchange another GOOD LCD. It still refused to work. By the way, the LCD inverter is inside the LCD unit, so replacing another good one should take care of this possibility as well.

Another strange thing I noticed is once I had the machine up for running more than an hour, the LCD becomes brighter again and the brightness comes back alive.

I suspect one of the capacitors in the board is not working. I hope I am wrong, might be someone could have a better suggestion.

Thanks.

celeron 366 only doing 433??? must have been a bad one, I had a 366@550 and a 400@600 66 to 100 fsb with a 15% voltage increase those old Soyo 440bx boards were great

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