Background
After the demise of my old K6-2, which was now limping badly at only 350MHz (more on that in a later article), I felt some new horsepower was needed. The choice was simple, get a K6-2 500 (kind of pushing the old socket 7 system), or go for a shiny new Celeron. At this time, the Celeron 550, I mean, 366 was kind of legendary. Sadly, no-one had any left. Inspired by all these positive reviews, I bought the next best thing: a Celeron 400. I also bought an AT PC-Chips motherboard in with a stack of my other monthly treats. "AT?" I hear you cry, "that's old technology". Well, yeah, but I needed the onboard sound and modem (so I could sell my existing cards to help fund it all) and I had to give my ATX case to my brother (it's complicated, OK?). Either way, this board was my only option.It wasn't really my intention to overclock it. I mean, a Celeron 400 should kick some serious butt as is. Anyway, I had read some old articles that said the Celeron 400s were actually bad clockers and '600 was an insane speed' to run a Celeron at. Therefore, when I assembled the PC, I set the FSB to 66MHz, to run the chip at its stated 400MHz. I was absolutely gob smacked however, when I first booted my shiny new combo and found it posted at 600MHz!! Bah, it's not my fault I can't tell the difference between '1-2' and '2-3' on the jumpers. After much dancing around the room, I realised that in the meantime, Windows had utterly failed to boot and created some icky registry errors (no doubt due to not enough voltage in the CPU). It was so knackered, it was a reformat job. Things like that tend to make you a little cautions, so I planned to leave the FSB at a nice, safe, 66MHz from now on.
A few days passed, and I noticed my brother's K6-2 350 was whipping my punk ass in things like 3D-Mark and Quake II. It would seem that all this 3DNow! stuff I hadn't really noticed before was actually making a big difference. To add insult to injury, he *then* went and got a K6-2 500 for his birthday, the very same chip I nearly went out and bought! I couldn't be outrun on raw CPU power by my younger brother! In a vain attempt to boost the flagging 3D performance in optimized apps, I turned up the Celery to 450. Although the CPU was fine, the Savage4 really did not like the 75MHz AGP bus. Dammit.
