Intel Celeron 420 - The cooler and core
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I was surprised by the stock cooler that it comes with. By the look of it from the top, it appears like any other Intel stock cooler. But checking the height, we see that this is about half the size as the traditional stock cooler. With only one core, little cache, and a mild speed, this CPU may not give off that much heat.
The core is called the Conroe-L. Intel spent some honest time hacking up the great Conroe core to get a bare CPU. First they dropped the FSB from 1066 MHz down to 800 MHz. This might not be that bad of a thing. I have proved that the low FSB kills bandwidth to the motherboard, but these CPUs with the 800 MHZ FSB also have higher multipliers, which should boost overclocks, or at least I hope.
Next they chopped a core off of the CPU. I would bet lots of money that there are two cores under the IHS, and one is disabled. I see no reason for Intel to create a whole new core for Celeron CPUs when it will be replaced in under a year anyways. Can you unlock the extra core? Probably not. If there is a way, you can be sure that I will share it with you when I find it. Finally, they hacked half of the cache off the CPU. With everything hacked off of this core, will the Conroe still possess what gives it the killing edge over AMD?
Compared to the earlier Celerons, many may consider this a downgrade. The old ones ran up to 3.6 GHz, while the new ones top out at 2.0 GHz. They continued support for 64-bit computing, which I'm hoping catches on soon. Intel has still left off some features from their mainstream CPUs, such as SpeedStep and Virtualization technology. Most people don't need or use these features most of the time. Intel did bump the FSB up from 533 MHz to 800 MHz. For those that have a home theater PC, the Celeron just became an option. The heat output dropped from 65w down to 35w, thanks to the new Conroe technology.
Overclocking
Running at 1.6 GHz on a 800 MHz FSB, this product will turn out to be a dud of a CPU when compared to faster versions with more cores and more cache. To make up for this, we have overclocking. The advantage of this CPU over the low end Core 2 Duo is that this has a higher multiplier and a low FSB to start with. This allows more headroom in the FSB arena, since this is often limited by the motherboard. When we overclocked the E2140, we were limited by the FSB, but not until we reached 400 MHz, a 100% overclock. I wasn't quite able to get to a 100% overclock with this CPU, but I didn't do too bad.
It seems that these chips are stopped by the FSB wall too. No matter what I did to the RAM or any other voltage controls, this chip wouldn't go over 3.1 GHz. Not that this is terribly bad for this chip, it's just that I feel that there is a lot more left in it. It should be interesting to see how well this chip does against the E2140 at stock speeds. Will the extra speed make up for the lack of the second core?
Next: Testing >>
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