Conclusion and rating
The Celeron appears to a processor that's suited to certain tasks and rather poor at others, given the relatively high clock speed that it comes to the market at. Due to the lack of L2 on-board cache it struggles in games and applications that require code to be reused on a data set. What that means in layman's terms is that if an application is coded such that a piece of code is accessed repeatedly, you ideally want as much of that code in cache as possible, it saves you going back to system memory as much.
However, if your application is more streaming in nature, such as DivXing and WAV compressing, the basic clockspeed of the Celeron makes it a reasonable processor. The fact that it is largely based on the newest core revision (0.13) and features the very latest C1-stepping ensures that it far exceeds its rated speed with ease.
Using an Alpha 8942 cooler and a Delta 80mm fan run at 7v, the Celeron was pushed to 3.15GHz with ease (1.625v load voltage). With this elevated speed it surpassed the performances laid down by all but the XP2700+ and P4 2.8 in DVD and WAV encoding. Gaming and SETI, the applications that use repeating code on datasets, saw an obvious improvement with a Celeron running substantially faster, but still trailed a stock 2.26GHz Northwood in each and every gaming benchmark, such is the detrimental effect of a lack of cache, amongst other things.
Searching various online vendors finds this processor priced at around the £100 mark, albeit bundled with a retail cooler. That price is a little too high for what is still considered a budget processor. Comparing directly to AMD's lineup, £100 will buy you an XP2000+ and reasonable cooler. The AMD CPU will be the better all-round processor, too.
At least Intel have modernised the Celeron processor to some degree. The fact that it overclocks so easily bodes well for increasing the basic clock speeds to the 3GHz level, should they need to. I just feel that the debilitating effects of only specifying 128kb of L2 cache really do impact heavily upon performance if your inclination is towards gaming or SETI. Intel have made sure that the Celeron cannot pose a realistic threat to their P4 processor when evaluated through a number of benchmarks.
Highs
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Overclocks fantastically well
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Is pretty good for certain benchmarks (DivXing in particular)
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Allows system integrators to produce Intel-based machines at a lower cost
Lows
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Is poor in gaming
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AMD offer more performance for your pound with their XP processors
Overall rating 7/10 (or 8/10
if you're solely interested in DivXing)