Budget CPU Upgrades: Intel's Celeron 766

Making sense of it all

If you remember back to our review of the Duron 800 we pointed out that at 800MHz the Duron was not considerably faster than any Celeron that would be released in the next six months.  Not to mention that at 800MHz, AMD would continue to extend their clock speed lead over Intel’s Celeron.  Intel’s philosophy with the Celeron, especially after the Duron started outperforming it at lower frequencies, was that clock speed sells, however that has obviously taken a back seat in this case. 

In spite of AMD’s performance and clock speed advantage in the value market segment, they unfortunately don’t have enough design wins for the Duron.  We have discussed the main reason behind this time and time again, there is no integrated video platform for the Duron while the Celeron has the i810, enabling it to be found in sub $600 systems.  According to Intel, the Duron isn’t really hurting the Celeron’s sales because of this, which is the reason that the Celeron won’t move to a higher performing 100MHz FSB until the first quarter of 2001. 

Intel’s assessment of the Duron’s impact on Celeron sales is partially correct and partially incorrect.  In Europe, the Duron sales have simply been incredible, however in the North American markets the Duron continues to suffer in favor of the Celeron.  The next chance AMD will get to push the Duron into retail systems will be early next year, conveniently around the same time when Intel will hope to bridge the performance gap somewhat by giving the Celeron a much needed 100MHz FSB. 

With all of that in mind, it makes perfect sense that Intel would release another 66MHz FSB Celeron before the year’s end.  Unfortunately it seems like it’s too late in the year to actually have the Celeron 766 found in any retail systems, and at the same time, with the processor just being recently introduced, it hasn’t even had time to drop in price to a reasonable level along with the rest of the Celerons.

Assuming we give the Celeron 766 the benefit of the doubt, and expect that it will drop down to the $100 arena shortly, how does it stand as an upgrade?  Obviously for a freshly built system, the Duron is the best option, but what about for the person that already has a BX board and maybe an older processor?  Does it make more sense to scrap your motherboard and pick up a KT133 + Duron or is the Celeron 766 able to breathe cheap new life into your existing system?  That is the focus we will be taking in this review.  We already know that the Celeron, clock for clock, is completely dominated by the Duron so there’s no point in going down that path of comparison any further, instead we’ll be looking at the value of the Celeron 766 as an upgrade, and compared to other $100 CPUs from AMD/Intel.