INTEL CELERON 366 AND 400 MHz AND NEW SOCKET 370 (Performance)
The Influence of the Front Side Bus
Intel wants to make us believe that 100 MHz FSB is significantly superior to 66 MHz FSB to justify the higher price of Pentium II over Celeron. With normal software I couldn't find much though.
The Celeron 400/66 is about 3.7% slower than the Pentium II 400 in Winstone 99, in Quake 2 it's about the same and in 3D StudioMax the Celeron is even a bit faster than Pentium II, due to its faster L2-cache.
Comparison of Socket370-Platforms
Intel wants to push the 440ZX chipset, but most of the Taiwanese motherboard manufacturers prefer 440LX. They have a good reason, because the LX-chipset is cheaper and a full blown PII-chipset, with support of five PCI bus masters, 4 DIMM slots and ECC. ZX is the stripped-down version of 440BX and thus not offering the same features as LX. The advantage of BX over LX is mainly the 100 MHz FSB-support, which isn't used in 'ZX-66' anyway. VIA's Apollo Pro Plus chipset is a new version of Apollo Pro for Slot1-systems. It is also fully equipped as Intel's LX, but even offering 100 MHz FSB-clock. This won't help much though if the new Celeron's are all overclock-protected.
The BX-chipset on Slot1 has got a slight edge over the Socket370 boards, but this could be due to the board architecture. After all the Slot1 test board is the Asus P2B, known as a particularly good performer. ZX and LX don't show any difference in Winstone 99, but ZX seems to have a better AGP-implementation, making it somewhat faster in Quake2. VIA's Apollo Pro Plus is definitely slower than the Intel chipsets, but that's what we already expected remembering the results of the Apollo Pro on Slot1.
CPU Office Performance under Windows 98
As in the years before, the new Winstone 99 shows different results to its predecessor when you compare different CPU-architectures. Whilst AMD's K6-2 was performing very well vs. Pentium II in Winstone 98, it now dropped a bit in Winstone 99.
This is the chart containing only the 'unoverclocked' CPUs. You can see that Celeron sticks up very well.
Including all overclocked CPUs makes the chart a lot larger, but not really much different. AMD's K6-2 400 is somewhere between Pentium II 333 and Celeron 366. Please realize that you might not be able to reach all those numbers anymore when Intel introduces the overclock-protection in all of their chips.
CPU 3D Gaming Performance
This time I used NVIDIA's RIVA TNT instead of 3Dfx's Voodoo2 for the Quake2-performance comparison chart. I did this because it is more valid when looking at other games than Quake 2. AMD has a special 3DNow!-patch for the combination of Quake2 and Voodoo2, but this patch does not exist for other games. Thus it's not really representative using the most ideal environment for K6-2.
For Intel CPUs I ran Quake2 3.20, for AMD CPUs Quake2 3.19 with AMD's Quake2 patch for 3.19, video mode '3Dnow! OpenGL' selected.
The same with overclocked CPUs:
This chart shows that the current Intel CPUs do still have the clear lead in 3D-gaming and I doubt that any hardcore gamer is really using K6-2. However, K6-2 is still sticking up pretty fine and can certainly be used for most 3D games out there just fine. Quake 2 at 1024x768 without a Voodoo2 is pretty tough with the K6-2 though.
FPU Performance
It is pretty much tradition that Tom's Hardware Guide is using 3D StudioMax for FPU-benchmarking. 3D rendering is one of the fields where some real FPU power is required unless you want to wait days for the rendering of your scenes.
This chart is not too different to the Quake2-chart. K6-2 has still got a hard time against any 6th-generation Intel CPU when it comes to pure FPU performance.
Articolo tratto dal sito www.tomshardware.com - 25/01/1999