Former Celeron 333A owner here, I remember doing the B21 taping trick on an Abit BH6 motherboard. Went from 333 MHz to 500 MHz, didn't generate any significant extra heat, and the speed boost was immense. The computer's horsepower basically doubled with that (and going from 32 MB PC100 RAM to 128 MB PC100 RAM doubled it again).
@@borismatesin I was still very happy with it, good price to performance ratio. Soon after with tape trick becoming more known, prices went up quickly. Even if not the best example, it still worked without problems until I got a new PC with Athlon 1700. I miss that quick tech progress from 90s and early 2000s.
I had stacks of 366s running at 550, I had multiple friends with them in dual. I literally never encountered a 300a that would not do 450. It was your mobo sicarius. I used to build pcs when these were new cpus, got to test a lot of them...
@@brianwelch1579 Probably that was the issue. Don't remember what maker it was, but before online shopping and reviews, it probably was something low to mid range that a local store had and magazine reviewed as good enough.
Celeron 300A guy here as well. Thing ran buttery smooth at 500Mhz. Free power was all the rage. Later I had an AMD Duron 600, did the "pencil trick", and it ran at 1Ghz with zero hiccups. Played Counterstrike on it like a boss. I miss the good old days. Great video!
I worked at a local computer store when these Celerons came out. Once word got out about what you could do with them, we couldn't keep them in stock. You paired one of these with an Abit motherboard and you had an absolute beast of a rig. Also, that Yamaha can truly slappa' da' BASS!
When he showed that sound card, I got excited. Had one of those on the PC growing up, and its MIDI sound is quite nostalgic for me. When I built a retro PC 10 years ago, it was the only old PC part that was lying around that I wanted to use again.
From what I could make out it’s an Yamaha XG chip. Basically the same chip found in their MU line of rack and half rack MIDI modules. Killer little machines.
I still have my Celeron 300A. Back in the day I used it with the Abit BH6 and overclocked to 450. Extremely stable and last several years until my next upgrade.
I had the same combo back then! Sadly, my BH6 developed bad caps later on and died spectacularly with part of the power delivery components on the board literally going up in flames. Took the CPU with it when it died.
I had one on a gigabyte ga6bxe, ran at 450 from the second boot and lasted me years, and then went to a friend who was just getting into pc's. I didn't upgrade until an Athlon xp 1900/2000 (sort of painful, I chipped the core on the 1900 putting a horrid thermaltake heatsink on it, so bought a 2000 the week after. Watching the video, reminded me it ended up with 640mb of ram and a tnt2 ultra after an original tnt to start with.
It's always amazing to me to see hardware that I used to buy as a teen in the late 90s in videos like this. The no-brand gold motherboards, the generic sound cards with the Yamaha chipset, and the cheapest CD-ROM and floppy drives I could get my hands on. The cheap CD-ROM drives taught me about spending a bit more to get something far superior as some of the cheap drives would freak out over disc errors and start spinning the disc as fast as the motor could go, which the magnetic clamp wasn't designed to handle, so your precious CD was launched into the nether regions of the drive getting scratched to hell. It was a wonderful time to learn and explore computing.
Yep, that was like my build at the time, all the cheap stuff out of the computer parts catalog (except I was socket 7). It was a fun time in computers for me. From building my first computer at age 12 or 13, slowly upgrading it, and eventually getting a modem and being able to go online.... There was so much change. I had a hand me down monitor that could only do 640x480@60hz and lived with that for a while till i replaced it.
and also remember that $2000 computer would be obsolete in 3 years. I don't mean "it won't run new games very well" I mean it straight up wouldn't run new games. Meanwhile, I'm still rocking a 6 year old Ryzen 2600 that frankly can still play any game I throw at it. (Sure sometimes settings have to be turned down, but they run). I also admit probably a bigger deal in the early 90s as opposed to late 90s but still, Moore's Law really went ballistic in the 90s.
If I remember it right, the 300A made in Malaysia was easier to overclock than those made in Costa rica Mine did 450 without any voltage mod but was unstable at any higher speeds or mods, my friend got his to 504Mhz with a little more voltage and improved cooling. Later on in the run when the 300A disappeared the Celeron 366 and 400 was good options, a bit too high of multiplier but they could reach good speeds with the right motherboard that allowed more granular bus speeds. I still have all that stuff in my attic. BH6 motherboards and all. I have the past 40 years of computing up there, never got rid of it. Perhaps I should start a channel going through it all. 🙂
I still have my Abit-BP6 with two Celeron 366's in it. I've ran it from the start with the FSB set to 100Mhz, which puts the CPU's at 550Mhz. It's still running to this day. 😊
I had all that stuff too, Celerons from the 300A (with SLI Voodoo 2) to 700 to 800Mhz models. The faster ones didn't O/C as well as the older ones. I do seem to remember getting one of the faster chips to run at 1.2Ghz. Good times. Really wish I had hung onto all that stuff, I'm glad someone did !!! [EDIT] I found old benchmarks in my backups. It was a Celeron 850 running at 1191Mhz with 140/140 bus speed.
@@Steve_Larson Those were the good times. I can still remember my first OC, it was on my Pentium 200MMX. I OC'd it to 250Mhz by bumping the bus from 66Mhz to 83Mhz. I needed the OC in order to play Unreal at a decent framerate. 😁
A bit later hardware, but when I switched my P3 rig to a CUSL2-C with BIOS adjustable FSB, I brought my 933 Coppermine to stable 1036 MHz (148 FSB) instead of the 980 (140 FSB) it would do on my old board that only had jumper adjustments. Fine grained settings truly are a blessing. (It would also to 1071 with 153 FSB, but for one I have to drop the memory down to 115, and hit hits more than the extra CPU gives me)
The 100 mhz bus speed was very important to overclocking because the BX chipset had a 2/3 divider for AGP and 1/4 for PCI. The 75 and 83mhz frequencies meant you couldn't have a proper divider for the appropriate bus so either you were underclocking or overclocking all your PCI and AGP devices. From what I recall 3DFX cards had issues with the 83mhz bus. Despite the reduced cache, the 300A at 450 would outperform the P2 450 in some benchmarks because of the full speed cache, which was just embarrassing for Intel. Fun times!
Almost true. :) If you were willing to solder few jumper wires you could feed at least to AGP, which usually was bigger problem than PCI, lower frequency. One could probably still find some of ancient forum posts I wrote back in the day on how to do this with Asus slot-1 motherboards. Resistor to lift and feed lower frequency was between AGP slot and 440BX chipset and very easy to access. Going higher than 133 MHz FSB was still challenge, I think around 140 was max even on boards that has clock chip capable of generating slightly above that. Getting that high frequencies from clock chip of course required more soldering.
Running 112 FSB (for 504 MHz on a 300A) would put the PCI at 37.33 MHz (with 1/4) which isn't too much, but AGP at 74.67 (with 2/3) or 84 MHz (with 3/4). Not all cards can do that, some slightly later Geforce will run fine even at 89 MHz (in case you want 133 FSB for a newer Pentium 3) i815 does a bit better, I can run my Coppermine 933 at 1071 with 153 FSB just fine, but I stop at 148 FSB because beyond that I need to drop my memory from 1/1 to 4/3 and that costs me more performance that the bit more CPU gives me.
Brings back memories... my 300A ran happily at 504mhz @112mhz bus speed without voltage increase, of course on an Abit BH6 mobo... ran great for many years!
You were one of the ones I was envious of if you ever posted that speed on a forum! I could only get a stable 50mhz overclock out of my K6-2, 100 would crash in a few minutes.
@@volvo09 I also had a Celeron 600 running at 1200mhz@133fsb, though that took a big heatsink and voltage increase, these little chips were surely capable.
@@Martin_from_SC And then look at the Tualatin Celerons, picking a 1200 and clocking it to 1596 with 133 FSB was absolutely a thing. They could've easily released a 1600 Tualatin, perhaps even more. Even the existing 1400 had no trouble doing 1575 MHz with 150 FSB. The only real limitation was getting memory that could run higher. Some people managed to get over 1700 out of a Celeron 1400. The current WR under air is 1839 MHz. That 600 @ 1200 was absolutely golden.
We had a computer lab I. Middle school full of Celeron 300A and 333A that we were able to overcook to 400 and 450 MHz. Our computer teacher instructed us on how to do it. He had two genuine pentium II towers that he used for his computer and the classroom file server and our over clocked systems kept up with them. We were successful enough in our efforts that the new computers for our Library and teachers were all over clocked Celeron A based systems. Needless to say the school district was very pleased to have saved so much money.
The tech school that I attended upgraded their old 386 and 486 servers with overclocked Celerons. The main server however was a Dual Pentium II 333 machine.
The May 1999 BIOS might have HDD size limit of 33.8 GB. The 4.3 GB HDD of August 1999 was a bit small though; IIRC 8.4 GB or 13 GB were the mainstream in mid-1999.
most of the later drives had a jumper setting to cap the drive at around 32gb making it detectable and usable by an older system although you'd lose some hdd space.
@@RastaHuisthis exactly. Newer drives seem to have lost the marking on the jumper, but still had it and it worked. I have a P3 450 system which has a 80 gb HDD. The jumper is unlabeled but works just fine limiting it to 32 gb.
this video is a good demonstration of how easy it is to build a pc nowadays, the minefield of compatibility issues then must have been very frustrating
No, it was fun. I always overclocked Intel CPU's to see what they could do. The 'Celery' was a favourite. AMD chips had to be treated carefully, to keep them cool, but they could be pushed if you had the right MB. Even earlier, when 486 was in vogue, Cyrix CPU's could be pushed to run faster than any Intel one with the same nominal clock speed. The 120 MHz chips could usually do 160 MHz and some went much faster. I had a Cyrix CPU running at 247 MHz for a year or two, with a bigger heatsink and a good blower. It was faster than some of the early Pentiums.
This brings me back to a time in the early 2000s when I overclocked my socket Celeron 566 to over 1Ghz using peltier cooling in my dorm room. Good times.
A bit of history: For the original Pentium and Pentium MMX processors, the CPU was in a socket with just the CPU on it, and any L2 cache was on the motherboard in a separate cache slot or in later ones soldered to the motherboard, that operated at best at the front side bus of the processor. Pentium Pro became a gigantic socketed CPU, because it had not just the CPU core on the processor circuit board, but also the L2 cache - running at the full speed of the CPU, not the front side bus speed. This is one reason the PPro ended up so much faster. Then came Pentium II, which was basically just "Pentium Pro MMX" in a different package, moving to the cartridge-like "Slot" system. One of the ways Pentium II became the "consumer" model was by cheapening the cache. Instead of cache running at full CPU speed, it used commodity cache chips further from the CPU on the CPU card, running at 1/2 CPU speed. (Much better than "front side bus speed" of the Socket 7 systems, though. (Of note - the "Pentium II Xeon" in the absolutely ginormous "Slot 2" package returned to "full CPU speed" L2 cache.) The very first Celerons were literally just the Pentium II core with no cache. Intel called it a different name (Covington instead of Deschutes) but it was the exact same core, just with a fused connection to tell it not to even try to use L2 cache. The 300A was the amazing change - 128KB of L2 cache - inside the CPU itself. Same piece of silicon as the CPU core, not even "separate chips on the same package" like Pentium Pro. The first consumer CPU to have so much cache onboard. It was still at the actual CPU _core_ level still a Deschutes Pentium II core, with the added cache. The main reason the CPUs could overclock so well was because by the time the Celeron 300A came out, Intel had firmly "solved" the core speeds. Most of the Deschutes Pentium IIs could actually handle 450 MHz no problem, most of the 400 MHz were just downclocked not because they had to be, but to sell the cheaper model. That meant that the Mendocino Celerons based on the same core generally had no problem going much faster. The same basic Mendocino core was officially released at up to 533 MHz. One of the reasons an overclocked 300A at 450 MHz did so well compared to a "full fat" Pentium II 450 MHz was that cache difference. Sure, then Pentium II had 512K of cache, but it was running at 1/2 speed. The Celeron may have only had 128K, but it was running at full speed. At the time, many applications were just fine with 128K of cache, so that faster cache was better than more-slower.
Ah, the age old method of selling a chip slower to meet market demand. The sheer amount of Northwood 1.8C that would do 2.4 without issue. Or all the slow clocking Core 2 chips that also went into the same 3.2-3.8 GHz range as the fast ones. And the dual core Athlons that could be unlocked into Phenom quads with a juicy 30% clock bump on top.
The Celeron 300 was a BEAST! During that era I built 5 gaming systems for family and friends, ALL of them where Celerons. Local stores helped out, binning the Celeron chips for a $25 charge. This mean we KNEW the chip we bought was going to clock to 450Mhz with no issues. It was an incredible chip for the time.
Intel Celeron processors were also pretty popular for Dell laptops at the time. My high school were able to buy those computers with Celeron processors because they cheap for each one in the classroom.
Thank you for this lovely memory! Everyone was talking about it back then. The next amazingly overclockable Celeron was the Celeron D 805, maybe a project for the future?! Keep up the great videos you make and best wishes from Germany.
This brought back some good memories. I had a dual celery 366 overclocked to 550MHz ASUS BP6 build that was both my favorite and least favorite thing. Man, I wish I still had that system.
Those old Trinitrons have just the most beautiful picture/color balance. When I worked for Disney in Florida they were liquidating Sony CRT monitors as low as $15 in the early/mid 2000s. I definitely bought a few.
In 2009 I bought a 35" Trinitron TV at a yard sale for $20. It had a beautiful picture and displayed laser disc playback flawlessly. Only problem was it weighed about 300lbs, almost crushed me moving into my man cave.
I grew up on Quake 3 on a P2-266. Dude your perseverance is incredible. I would have given up. Love how you were able to do everything with period accuracy. I wonder if the thermal paste was bad for your 300A and if you applied new thermal compound if that would have made a difference. Although like the poster below Costa Rica was easier to OC than Malaysia. It was fun going down memory lane seeing all that old hardware and software. Thanks for posting this video!
I was part of the Pentium II development team in assy specific to System Level test. Your video is spot on from the board, peripherals and even the OS setup to the Quake game. The Yamaha board playing the Passport MIDI was similar from my home PC setup😅. THANK you for this piece of nostalgia.
I bought a Celeron 300A system at the time they were launched in Europe. 300A; 64MB RAM; Riva TNT, Voodoo 2 12 MB, a SB Live 5.1 and a set of 5.1 Cambridge Sound Works speakers from Crreative. My 300A wouldn't boot @ 450MHz. Then I put a 80mm fan from a server in front of the stock cooler, turn the pc on and it booted normally @ 450MHz. Run it like that until th system got replaced by an Athlon 2400+. I can't recall the motherboard model, but at the time we were using in all builds Asus boards with the 440BX chipset. The 440LX(?) was a crap chipset: worse performance and more buggy. The 440 BX was rock solid. The legendary status is well and truly deserved.
Mhm falling a little short of P2 for sure. Faster cache is helpful, but not helpful enough to completely offset the penalty from having a quarter of the cache. Rule of thumb, doubling of cache gains 7% performance.
@@SianaGearz it's a bit of cache size vs cache speed. If something makes use of >128k then yes, the P3 was noticeably faster. but if it works fine with the small cache, the Celeron runs ahead. All depends a bit on the task. I remember some tests during the core 2 era, where going from 512k to 1M gave about 15-20% and going to 2M gave about 20-30% in actual games. But there are diminishing returns. In the same test, going from 3M to 6M gave only about 5-10%
Did Microsoft ever make an optical mouse that looked like the classic Microsoft ball mouse that was right hand only. I liked it's ergonomics over the intellimouse, which if I recall was ambidextrous.
Same! I didn’t know there was an actual fanbase for that mouse outside of me. I just built an ‘02-era XP rig (spec’d to the max inside my favorite tower- the translucent bezel’d Compaq 5000 series) last month and the 2-button Intellimouse was of course my pick.
@@volvo09 You're looking for "IntelliMouse w IntelliEye 1.0 USB PS/2 Compatible". The ambi styled one you're thinking of was called "IntelliMouse Optical". Very confusing naming right, both are actually optical.
I had one of these. It was a overclocked to 450MHz and I paired it with a Creative Labs Voodoo Blaster Banshee. It was a hotrod gaming machine in 1999. The crazy part is that when it was obsolete, we just threw all that stuff in the trash without giving it a second thought.
I priced up a PII-450 back in 1998 and went to the local computer store to buy the components. The guy looked at my proposal and said "You don't want me to sell you that" and suggested a 300A which would overclock to 450 and save me a ton of money. Ran that PC for 3 more years, and it was rock solid the whole time.
Had a 300A that consistently ran at 450/100 on an Abit BH6-II without issue. BH6-II, and I'm sure other boards did this as well, had a the ability to bump up above 100 main bus thought I can't remember what it's max was. I do remember trying it occasionally with mixed results. The issue was always heat but with a good heatsink or even peltier module it would work for extended periods. Also one thing I noticed with yours was the "Costa Rica" on there. Back in the day when this was THE thing to do it was always recommended to get the "Malaysia" made ones. Something about them, maybe just a minor manufacturing/quality variance or something to do with that pin being "taped over" (figuratively speaking) from the factory? No idea but they worked. Damn I feel old now. 🤣
Ah this takes me back to the early 2000s when I was actually building PCs. Specifically, buying budget parts and then having to buy them again because they were either DOA or incompatible.
53 year old here. I remember those chips and absolutely loved them. Dont know if you have done a video yet on this but my best and most prized board and chips were on the Abit BP6 with VooDOo II. Would love to see you do a build with it.
Celeron 366 owner here. Bought the MSI bx440 mobo and cpu from NCIX guarenteed to overclock to 550 mhz. This was such an exciting period of time.... Every 6 months was a leap ahead, and hardware from a year ago was obsolete (i use a 10 year old computer now adays) .. Online gaming technical challenges were overcome (gamespy and good netcode) and reaching a golden age (counterstrike,starcraft,everquest). What a weird time go grow up: as i thought this rate of change was normal.
300A, what a legend. mine ran @ 450 for its life and spent a little time in the fast lane @ 504 as well.. BH6 of course :) it got replaced by a 733 celery clocked straight to 915 then 1.1ghz for its life as well 💪.. what a time that was to be working in the industry
I used to find these all the time back when i worked at a recycling yard, i was always curious what these were for. Great video! And thanks for the information!
I clearly remember that the '90s and early 2000s were incredible when it came to computer performance improvements. Every 6-7 months, computers became so much more powerful that new applications wouldn’t even run on the previous generation of PCs. Today, I'm using all kinds of software on 10-year-old computers and on current ones, and there isn’t much of a difference in terms of performance.
To True. my Daily driver just celebrated her 12th birthday. Granted, it was top of the line when new, but I only paid $250 for it at auction. I dont play many PC games any more, and it handles my day-to-day needs without a hitch. Ive looked into custom building a more 'modern' rig a few times, but I simply cant justify the cost. 3D CAD performs flawless, and the more 'adult' things I need to do like Email and banking, well, they're always gonna work, just as long as its not laggy im happy. about the only thing it struggles with is reaaally high res video, but my screen cant to that anyway, and my eyes aren't that good for it to really matter.
I was 8 when I last built a system like this. The ribbon cables bring back memories of trying to troubleshoot why my hard drive didn't work. I had the wrong master jumper selected.
On the Genica page the top image was a CD player. That was the MPTrip. It was the first commercially available CD player that played MP3 CDs. I had one of those and it was world changing for an 18-year-old kid with their first car. No more having to swap out discs to change albums. I could store dozens at a time.
My first pc was on celeron 300, good old times ;( And my father bought me it because in some pc magazine there was an article, how to overclock it :) because there was no interner at my location in that time
I had a Celeron 300A that ran stable at 450MHz for years with just the stock heatsink. That computer was an absolute champ. Of all the A models, the 300A was the most commonly used for overclocking. There were extreme enthusiasts out there that were using peltier plates and phase change cooling methods. They were able to push the the 300A to a whopping 600MHz - twice the rated clock speed. There were even online forums that tracked successes and failures based on batch codes and manufacturing dates. It was a great time to be a computer geek.
I made a PC and bought a Celeron 533A (Tulatin) back when they were new and it overclocked nicely to 800MHz with only a 50mV increase in voltage. Which was less the CPU and more a motherboard thing as even non-overclocked it crashed randomly. But give it 50mV more (it was like 1.80 to 1.85V) made it rock solid. That too was a major overclock, and it too had half the cache of the Pentium III of the era (the 533A was based on a Pentium III core).
Haven't even started the video and I already know this is about the Celeron 300a and 333a. They were the GOAT Slot 1 Pentium II era. EDIT: Seeing the struggles with the drives, this is why a lot of folks started looking to cards from Promise and High Point for their IDE controllers since they had better support for LBA32 (and later LBA48) drive support.
I was one of the few who ended up overclocking on a VIA chipset before I got a 440BX motherboard. The overall performance wasn't as good but the overclocking potential was insane. My 300A had the shrouded cooler on it, not the one in the video and it ran like lightning. If I was willing to accept occasional crashes, I could reliably get 540MHz out of it, and 504 was pretty much rock solid.
What you were seeing with the memory density on your motherboard is actually very common across all 440BX era boards, as they had trouble addressing high density memory modules. I've ran into this quite a few times even on my higher end MSI motherboard. The next evolution of Intel chipsets, the i810/815 resolved this issue to my knowledge BUT those were limited to only 512MB memory at maximum, rather than the potential 1GB on 440BX boards. The best way to get around this limitation was to acquire double-sided memory modules rather than the later single-sided SDRAM modules used by low-end boards from the P4 and Athlon XP era.
The i815 has another interesting memory limitation. It only supports 4 ranks, but most boards have 3 slots. So depending on how your sticks are set up, you might not be able to run a pair of 256M sticks or a 256M and a pair of 128M together.
When I saw the title of this video, I knew exactly which Celeron you were going to be talking about. I built about 40 of these overclocked Celeron 300A systems back in the day. Everyone of them overclocked fine to 450Mhz. IIRC there was one Intel plant that made these in lower quantities that didn't overclock as nice as the other...or something like that. The trick I used is that if you bought the 300A in the Intel retail packaging which included the Intel branded cooler, those were always from the good source and always overclocked to 450mhz super-duper easy. If you bought a bare processor without Intel cooler, you might get one from the other source and you had a chance of it not overclocking to 450mhz (although many did just fine). Again all of this is IIRC.
The Celeron 300a was a beast because the 128k Cache was on the cpu die, not on the slot-1 pcb at 1/2 clock divider. At that time, coding was still very tight and little if anything would fall out of the l2 on-die cache and hit the ram. If it stayed in that magic full speed 128k on-die cache it ran better by small margins due to lower access latency .. i loved my 300a .. simply an amazing cpu.
Had the 450 Mhz one and was really a gaming, emulation, and media editing BEAST for the price in that era. Used it even for a good part of the Windows XP era.
I had a Celeron 300A. Overclocked to 450, on the Abit BH-6. The overclocker wombo combo. Incredibly stable, cooling on them was honestly easy (especially compared to today). It was a dream. I That system served as a primary gaming rig for many years, didn't replace it until 2004 when I upgraded to run Doom 3. Even remember having an Nvidia TNT card, followed by an original GeForce. Good times. I kept the system going for years after that as a secondary, and did eventually have to bring it back down to 300, but that system was a rock.
I remembered building PCs to sell at eBay and as a computer technician at a computer retailer around this time. These Celerons were very popular. Crazy thing was that you could do the overclocking with the Cyrix chips that were clocked at 50Mhz and use Amptron or other motherboards that have 66Mhz and 75Mhz to bump up the speed depending on the chip from 150Mhz to 225Mhz. Or 200Mhz to 350Mhz depending on the chip. Did noticed a big difference from 150Mhz to 225Mhz when playing a snes emulator running Super Punch Out that time. Golden era.
To get 450mhz out of a 300a you need to overvolt, and that can be achieved putting a tiny piece of tape on a certain pin of the CPU itself. It changed voltage from 2V to 2.2 and allowed the overclocking on pretty much all the 300As. Because of the 100mhz bus speed the 300a outperformed the p2 at same clock speed. Great memories of taping all my friends' CPUs 😅
I went one step further and bought 2 of the flip chip BGA variants, a couple of slot-1 converters and a dual slot motherboard. After soldering the bus arbitration pin from the socket to the edge connected. I had a dual 300A system running at 450mhz. A true beast. Triple booted into windows 2000, Linux and BeOS.
good memories. The pentium 2 300 was my last computer with a massve gap inbetween till I built a Pentium 4 2,8 explicitly to play doom3. Totally skipped the P3 era but am now making up for it with an exploding in size collection, lol.
The p2b came in a few revisions. The one I have right now has an over volt jumper to over bolt the cpu and stabilize over locking. Here were also versions without the jumper
Thanks for the nostalgia trip! I worked building computers back then and built many systems with similar specs. from what I can see the memory and the replacement optical drive was the only real thing you went with that was more than usual. Great video! You were correct. That board would not let you push power too much. The cheaper boards would trigger power protections at relatively low thresholds or straight up give up the magic smoke. The power delivery circuitry was much better on the higher end boards.
One of the first pre-built computers my parents bought me was an generic eMachine...that happened to have a Celery 300A in it. Saved up for an Abit board and I ran that chip at 450 mhz for years, long after it was my daily driver it ran slackware linux iptables-firewall (back before you could just buy an off the shelf router lol) I got a good 7+ years out of that chip before retiring it. As far as yours went, you just lost the silicon lottery. The reason the celeron 300A's OC'd so well is because they were actually p2 450 chips that couldnt pass QC so they got binned for the Celerons. Yours probably had more issues than most and it just wasnt in good enough shape to run at 450.
I still have my best overclocked PC. It has a Celeron 566 on an Asus socket 7 slotket, plugged into a Gigabyte GA-BX2000. It ran my Win2000 advanced server for years at 850 MHz. That PC was a beast back in the day.
The original Mendencino and Coppermine 128 Celerons were great chips for the money. I had both a 300A oc'd to 464 MHz and later a 566 Mhz model that oc'd to 875 MHz for quite a bit.
I love the ultra small celeron laptops, I have two of them and use one for field work. Recently I had one sitting outside for a week running headless with a GPS receiver and radio all powered via solar for some testing, worked great!
It still amazes me that PCs took off in the home market for how much they used to cost vs how little they did. When you mentioned this could have been a (1998)$600 build back in the day? I think something this capable would have been the kind of thing to finally push me into it. (For reference my first build was $290 for a Celeron G1610, 4GB RAM, 60GB SSD, and a Radeon 7770 1GB)
They didn't do little at all! They were quite capable, the software of the time was really quite impressive. Office software hasn't really gained any substantial capability since 1997. Photoshop already had not only layers but even smart layer effects, and with 64MB RAM you're editing an A4 page at 200dpi with a handful layers no problem, a little crunchy maybe. A pMMX is not really enough to do any DAW tasks, only fine for pure MIDI, but a P2 was already sufficient. But it's also to be said how good Cakewalk was at MIDI editing. And Quake 3 is as good as any eSports game ever. And of course that's the era of Internet Explorer 5. You could load up ICQ or Trillian and you'd have instant messaging with your friends and wouldn't feel a substantial impact on the system performance at all. I had 3D modelled in 1997 in trueSpace 3 on a Pentium MMX, and raytrace rendered pictures; by end of 2001 i was using Blender 2.0 on an Athlon, a little later i had a Geforce2mx and was handling scenes with a million polygons and could render animations overnight. For the most part, things don't even feel that much better today. The impressive growth of hardware performance was offset by decrease in software efficiency, except in select areas. Think of any creative or productivity or entertainment task, and late 90s PC was able to do it, which is where they really took off, with Internet being a massive adoption driver as well.
Another former 300A owner here, ran it at 450MHz paired with a Voodoo3 3000 card. Many hours spent playing Quake3 and Unreal Tournament over LAN with friends on the weekends...
I remember my first build from scratch: a Celeron 300. I pushed the FSB just like you did and made a Celeron 450. Luckily, I did this in 2001 with ebay parts. I got a P2 upgrade second-hand eventually.
Worth noting that with simple utilities released by hard drive makers, you could get around the large hard drive thing. Just set the bios to anything manual, boot the utility floppy, and it would install something into the hard drive's MBR that would override BIOS calls and let it use the full size. The caveat was you couldn't boot directly from any boot disks afterwards and see the drive, so most had a little pause or indicator to push or hold down a key during hard drive boot to then boot from floppy. The Western Digital one wasn't hardware locked and could be used on any large drive. Also (if you didn't just cut it for relevancy/time) be sure to install motherboard chipset drivers and double check to make sure the drive is operating in DMA mode. It could make a difference for AGP video performance as well.
I had a Pentium II system back in the day and had a similar problem when wanting to upgrade from a 5 GB disk to a 40 GB one. What fixed it for me was a simple BIOS update.
This build comes shockingly close to resembling my first computer (a gift for Christmas 1999 - thanks parents!). It had a Celeron 400, 64mb of RAM, and a Riva TNT 2.
Excellent video. But, again someone makes a video about 300A, or PII celerons. Nobody ever made a video about Coppermine based Celerons, who were also amazing overclockers. Yes they were just a little bit slower than Durons, but still amazing. I had Celeron 566 who worked @952 MHz for everyday use.
The Coppermine ones were almost a bit boring between the 300A and the Tualatin Celerons. Sure, they clocked well. As did the Core 2 based ones. But the Coppermine Celerons just weren't that huge as the 300A.
I had one of these chips, it was completely stable at even with my cheap motherboard (no extra voltage, no better memories, nothing, just increased FSB). I used it overclock constantly without issues. :)
I got mine to 500 mhz back in the day. Astonishingly it seemed to operate at 450 perfectly, not just faster but even a bit cooler than stock! 500 pushed it as the temps would rise significantly. It seemed as if 450 was a natural state of these CPUs and yes it was super easy and rock solid. I built systems for friends and family based on these early celerons. All them had gone up to 450 mhz no problem.
I don’t remember what motherboard it was, but I had a 300a and simply putting in PC100 RAM it ended up overclocking itself to 450MHz (due to the multiplier with the faster front side bus). Loved it. I got mine in the Socket 370 version, but my board was a slot 1 board. To get it to work, an adapter called a “Slocket” was used, which was basically a socket 370 on a daughterboard with a slot 1 edge connector. You even used socket 370 coolers on it. The first Xeon processors also came out about this time and were absolutely massive things. Basically a really tall Pentium II to make room for the extra cache chips running at full speed.
If I remember correctly, OnTrack Disk Manager could override the BIOS's hard disk size. I believe you just set it to anything but auto so it works, then use that tool to utilise it's full capacity. It's been a few decades since I've done that though, so don't ask for more details 😂
The last PC I ever built was a Socket 370 Celeron 366 which I clocked to 550 on an Abit BE6-II. I don’t recall how much RAM I loaded. I do remember the ginormous Superpower Landmark case I put it in, though. 🤪 I ran Win95 with Litestep on it. I remember trying to make it run Linux (some version of Debian, IIRC, with KDE) and it completely choked. Good times. Thanks for the memories. 😁
We did this in my computer class in 2006. We had like 30 computers built with intentional faults that we had to diagnose and a bunch of them were celerons. The fault in my system was a "bad" IDE ribbon. I was supposed to find it by diagnosing unreadable sectors, but I took the side panel off first to check for loose connections and saw the cable was manufactured with about 3mm of one of the wires cut out right in the middle of the ribbon. Fixed it without ever booting up. 😂
I miss this era, and the games that came with it. Not hung up on the latest and greatest, still playing old games like Myst and lucasarts titles as well as new stuff. If it was good it got the seal of approval. I love modern games, but there is something about this late 90s- early naughties era that brings back that warm fuzzy feeling. It makes me a tad emotional!
I sold computers back then and I sold 100's of those Celeron 300A systems with the BH6 board, whatever the newest Sound Blaster and ATI All-In-Wonder video cards were too. That made a great computer back then! Every 300A I bought overclocked to 450Mhz, not one failed.
It was 1999, i had a 300A (made in Costarica if i remember) immediately set @ 463 (103 FSB) on a small Soyo BX board in AT form, fitting my old Pentium 133 case. Rock stable, coupled with a 3dfx Banshee, i was the king of the hill that summer!
For a min there i thought you where going to talk about the duel CPU celeron mod you could cobbel together. I'm still hopeing one youtuber will be able to pull it off as even i failed back in the day. But that was mainly to being a poor student and the MB i got being broken in postage and not being able to find another one that didn't cost an arm and a leg. If MB was ok all i had to do then was buy or "borrow" a copy of win NT 4.0 so i could use the dam thing for 3d rendering. Even with my hopes dashed it was still an extremely enjoyable video. Cheers.
I ran that configuration for a while myself at the time. I was a hard core Linux user already, so I didn't even need to change my OS to get to that SMP goodness
I had a Celeron 300A running at 450 MHz for a a while a couple of years after they came out. It was given to me by a buddy that upgraded. I also had a real PII 450 and they were very close to each other. It's too bad yours didn't make it to 100 MHz FSB to see. Anyways, thanks for the video. It was fun.
Loved my 300A at 464 on a BH6. Those were the days boy. It blows my mind that I can emulate a P2 and Voodoo3 on my 5800X3D to play all of those classics especially after downsizing in apartments and having to get rid of my DOS era boxen.
Yay! You've built nearly my identical PC from the late 90s, except I had a Celeron 333A that I overclocked to somewhere around 450mhz. The TNT card was amazing for Quake 3 Arena.
Former Celeron 333A owner here, I remember doing the B21 taping trick on an Abit BH6 motherboard. Went from 333 MHz to 500 MHz, didn't generate any significant extra heat, and the speed boost was immense. The computer's horsepower basically doubled with that (and going from 32 MB PC100 RAM to 128 MB PC100 RAM doubled it again).
Nice. My 300A could do 433MHz. Tech magazines claimed 450, by my crashed.
@@Sicarius888 That's just the silicon lottery not dealing you the best CPU, sadly.
@@borismatesin I was still very happy with it, good price to performance ratio. Soon after with tape trick becoming more known, prices went up quickly.
Even if not the best example, it still worked without problems until I got a new PC with Athlon 1700. I miss that quick tech progress from 90s and early 2000s.
I had stacks of 366s running at 550, I had multiple friends with them in dual. I literally never encountered a 300a that would not do 450. It was your mobo sicarius. I used to build pcs when these were new cpus, got to test a lot of them...
@@brianwelch1579 Probably that was the issue. Don't remember what maker it was, but before online shopping and reviews, it probably was something low to mid range that a local store had and magazine reviewed as good enough.
Celeron 300A guy here as well. Thing ran buttery smooth at 500Mhz. Free power was all the rage. Later I had an AMD Duron 600, did the "pencil trick", and it ran at 1Ghz with zero hiccups. Played Counterstrike on it like a boss. I miss the good old days. Great video!
You win the internet.
For me the name Celeron always conjured up the image of a processor made of celery.
The best processors to go with peanut butter and milk. 😂
that would certainly explain the netburst celerons
Lots of people actually made fun of them by calling them "celery" back then.
The Incel Celery processor
same
I worked at a local computer store when these Celerons came out. Once word got out about what you could do with them, we couldn't keep them in stock. You paired one of these with an Abit motherboard and you had an absolute beast of a rig.
Also, that Yamaha can truly slappa' da' BASS!
When he showed that sound card, I got excited. Had one of those on the PC growing up, and its MIDI sound is quite nostalgic for me. When I built a retro PC 10 years ago, it was the only old PC part that was lying around that I wanted to use again.
I got given a BE6-II when I was getting into computers, that was a really fun system.
I had one of these also with a ABIT board man it was a monster. With the Golden orb cooler.......
From what I could make out it’s an Yamaha XG chip. Basically the same chip found in their MU line of rack and half rack MIDI modules. Killer little machines.
"what they could do" all they do is process data.. that's what a cpu does. It's either faster or slower than another cpu - it can't do less or more
Watching this video is like watching a person from the future try to fit in a few decades ago.
Like an old new video, go's with the theme, old new stock 😅😂
Then fails and becomes the hobo captain from star trek Voyager.
@@leggysoftAt least they got the mobile emitter then that somehow didn't create any time paradoxes.
"How do you do, fellow kids--uh I mean Celeron owners?"
Reality show bro!
I still have my Celeron 300A. Back in the day I used it with the Abit BH6 and overclocked to 450. Extremely stable and last several years until my next upgrade.
I had the same combo back then! Sadly, my BH6 developed bad caps later on and died spectacularly with part of the power delivery components on the board literally going up in flames. Took the CPU with it when it died.
I had one on a gigabyte ga6bxe, ran at 450 from the second boot and lasted me years, and then went to a friend who was just getting into pc's. I didn't upgrade until an Athlon xp 1900/2000 (sort of painful, I chipped the core on the 1900 putting a horrid thermaltake heatsink on it, so bought a 2000 the week after. Watching the video, reminded me it ended up with 640mb of ram and a tnt2 ultra after an original tnt to start with.
Exactly the pair I had too. Before had 133 pentium and after a AMD Athlon X2 64, and then, of course a 2500K -which I still have.
That was the combo
Same here
It's always amazing to me to see hardware that I used to buy as a teen in the late 90s in videos like this. The no-brand gold motherboards, the generic sound cards with the Yamaha chipset, and the cheapest CD-ROM and floppy drives I could get my hands on. The cheap CD-ROM drives taught me about spending a bit more to get something far superior as some of the cheap drives would freak out over disc errors and start spinning the disc as fast as the motor could go, which the magnetic clamp wasn't designed to handle, so your precious CD was launched into the nether regions of the drive getting scratched to hell. It was a wonderful time to learn and explore computing.
Yep, that was like my build at the time, all the cheap stuff out of the computer parts catalog (except I was socket 7).
It was a fun time in computers for me. From building my first computer at age 12 or 13, slowly upgrading it, and eventually getting a modem and being able to go online.... There was so much change.
I had a hand me down monitor that could only do 640x480@60hz and lived with that for a while till i replaced it.
I primarily remember the nightmares of device driver incompatibility.
I learnt don't buy cheap PSUs and cheap motherboards! 😂
That price was a steal back then. It wasn’t too far removed from the day where a “normal” computer was over $2000.
When we got our first 486 we had to take out a loan! Hard to believe now.
and also remember that $2000 computer would be obsolete in 3 years. I don't mean "it won't run new games very well" I mean it straight up wouldn't run new games.
Meanwhile, I'm still rocking a 6 year old Ryzen 2600 that frankly can still play any game I throw at it. (Sure sometimes settings have to be turned down, but they run).
I also admit probably a bigger deal in the early 90s as opposed to late 90s but still, Moore's Law really went ballistic in the 90s.
@@rayjaymor8754Absolutely. You are absolutely right. Meanwhile my parents have had their HP i5 for like 14 years and it still runs great
If I remember it right, the 300A made in Malaysia was easier to overclock than those made in Costa rica Mine did 450 without any voltage mod but was unstable at any higher speeds or mods, my friend got his to 504Mhz with a little more voltage and improved cooling. Later on in the run when the 300A disappeared the Celeron 366 and 400 was good options, a bit too high of multiplier but they could reach good speeds with the right motherboard that allowed more granular bus speeds. I still have all that stuff in my attic. BH6 motherboards and all. I have the past 40 years of computing up there, never got rid of it. Perhaps I should start a channel going through it all. 🙂
I still have my Abit-BP6 with two Celeron 366's in it. I've ran it from the start with the FSB set to 100Mhz, which puts the CPU's at 550Mhz. It's still running to this day. 😊
@@justincase9471 333 SL36B and 366 SL36C 😊
I had all that stuff too, Celerons from the 300A (with SLI Voodoo 2) to 700 to 800Mhz models. The faster ones didn't O/C as well as the older ones. I do seem to remember getting one of the faster chips to run at 1.2Ghz. Good times. Really wish I had hung onto all that stuff, I'm glad someone did !!! [EDIT] I found old benchmarks in my backups. It was a Celeron 850 running at 1191Mhz with 140/140 bus speed.
@@Steve_Larson Those were the good times. I can still remember my first OC, it was on my Pentium 200MMX. I OC'd it to 250Mhz by bumping the bus from 66Mhz to 83Mhz. I needed the OC in order to play Unreal at a decent framerate. 😁
A bit later hardware, but when I switched my P3 rig to a CUSL2-C with BIOS adjustable FSB, I brought my 933 Coppermine to stable 1036 MHz (148 FSB) instead of the 980 (140 FSB) it would do on my old board that only had jumper adjustments. Fine grained settings truly are a blessing. (It would also to 1071 with 153 FSB, but for one I have to drop the memory down to 115, and hit hits more than the extra CPU gives me)
The 100 mhz bus speed was very important to overclocking because the BX chipset had a 2/3 divider for AGP and 1/4 for PCI. The 75 and 83mhz frequencies meant you couldn't have a proper divider for the appropriate bus so either you were underclocking or overclocking all your PCI and AGP devices. From what I recall 3DFX cards had issues with the 83mhz bus.
Despite the reduced cache, the 300A at 450 would outperform the P2 450 in some benchmarks because of the full speed cache, which was just embarrassing for Intel. Fun times!
Almost all benchmarks
Almost true. :) If you were willing to solder few jumper wires you could feed at least to AGP, which usually was bigger problem than PCI, lower frequency. One could probably still find some of ancient forum posts I wrote back in the day on how to do this with Asus slot-1 motherboards. Resistor to lift and feed lower frequency was between AGP slot and 440BX chipset and very easy to access. Going higher than 133 MHz FSB was still challenge, I think around 140 was max even on boards that has clock chip capable of generating slightly above that. Getting that high frequencies from clock chip of course required more soldering.
Running 112 FSB (for 504 MHz on a 300A) would put the PCI at 37.33 MHz (with 1/4) which isn't too much, but AGP at 74.67 (with 2/3) or 84 MHz (with 3/4). Not all cards can do that, some slightly later Geforce will run fine even at 89 MHz (in case you want 133 FSB for a newer Pentium 3)
i815 does a bit better, I can run my Coppermine 933 at 1071 with 153 FSB just fine, but I stop at 148 FSB because beyond that I need to drop my memory from 1/1 to 4/3 and that costs me more performance that the bit more CPU gives me.
Brings back memories... my 300A ran happily at 504mhz @112mhz bus speed without voltage increase, of course on an Abit BH6 mobo... ran great for many years!
You were one of the ones I was envious of if you ever posted that speed on a forum!
I could only get a stable 50mhz overclock out of my K6-2, 100 would crash in a few minutes.
@@volvo09 I also had a Celeron 600 running at 1200mhz@133fsb, though that took a big heatsink and voltage increase, these little chips were surely capable.
@@Martin_from_SC And then look at the Tualatin Celerons, picking a 1200 and clocking it to 1596 with 133 FSB was absolutely a thing. They could've easily released a 1600 Tualatin, perhaps even more. Even the existing 1400 had no trouble doing 1575 MHz with 150 FSB. The only real limitation was getting memory that could run higher.
Some people managed to get over 1700 out of a Celeron 1400. The current WR under air is 1839 MHz.
That 600 @ 1200 was absolutely golden.
We had a computer lab I. Middle school full of Celeron 300A and 333A that we were able to overcook to 400 and 450 MHz. Our computer teacher instructed us on how to do it. He had two genuine pentium II towers that he used for his computer and the classroom file server and our over clocked systems kept up with them. We were successful enough in our efforts that the new computers for our Library and teachers were all over clocked Celeron A based systems. Needless to say the school district was very pleased to have saved so much money.
The tech school that I attended upgraded their old 386 and 486 servers with overclocked Celerons. The main server however was a Dual Pentium II 333 machine.
The May 1999 BIOS might have HDD size limit of 33.8 GB. The 4.3 GB HDD of August 1999 was a bit small though; IIRC 8.4 GB or 13 GB were the mainstream in mid-1999.
most of the later drives had a jumper setting to cap the drive at around 32gb making it detectable and usable by an older system although you'd lose some hdd space.
@@RastaHuisthis exactly. Newer drives seem to have lost the marking on the jumper, but still had it and it worked. I have a P3 450 system which has a 80 gb HDD. The jumper is unlabeled but works just fine limiting it to 32 gb.
4.3 gigs was the standard drive size in 1998. I remember my mom buying a custom built PC back then, with a drive like that.
@@Skarfar90huh- I don't even remember them being that large back then, funny what you do,.and don't, remember!
this video is a good demonstration of how easy it is to build a pc nowadays, the minefield of compatibility issues then must have been very frustrating
No, it was fun. I always overclocked Intel CPU's to see what they could do. The 'Celery' was a favourite. AMD chips had to be treated carefully, to keep them cool, but they could be pushed if you had the right MB. Even earlier, when 486 was in vogue, Cyrix CPU's could be pushed to run faster than any Intel one with the same nominal clock speed. The 120 MHz chips could usually do 160 MHz and some went much faster. I had a Cyrix CPU running at 247 MHz for a year or two, with a bigger heatsink and a good blower. It was faster than some of the early Pentiums.
I'm bookmarking this as a perfect PC build & story video. Excellent production ! Thanks ! 🙂
This brings me back to a time in the early 2000s when I overclocked my socket Celeron 566 to over 1Ghz using peltier cooling in my dorm room. Good times.
Ooh peltier! Fancypants
16:52 really great seeing you support LGR after the hurricane with a domed badge from Geekenspiel!
A bit of history:
For the original Pentium and Pentium MMX processors, the CPU was in a socket with just the CPU on it, and any L2 cache was on the motherboard in a separate cache slot or in later ones soldered to the motherboard, that operated at best at the front side bus of the processor.
Pentium Pro became a gigantic socketed CPU, because it had not just the CPU core on the processor circuit board, but also the L2 cache - running at the full speed of the CPU, not the front side bus speed. This is one reason the PPro ended up so much faster.
Then came Pentium II, which was basically just "Pentium Pro MMX" in a different package, moving to the cartridge-like "Slot" system. One of the ways Pentium II became the "consumer" model was by cheapening the cache. Instead of cache running at full CPU speed, it used commodity cache chips further from the CPU on the CPU card, running at 1/2 CPU speed. (Much better than "front side bus speed" of the Socket 7 systems, though. (Of note - the "Pentium II Xeon" in the absolutely ginormous "Slot 2" package returned to "full CPU speed" L2 cache.)
The very first Celerons were literally just the Pentium II core with no cache. Intel called it a different name (Covington instead of Deschutes) but it was the exact same core, just with a fused connection to tell it not to even try to use L2 cache.
The 300A was the amazing change - 128KB of L2 cache - inside the CPU itself. Same piece of silicon as the CPU core, not even "separate chips on the same package" like Pentium Pro. The first consumer CPU to have so much cache onboard. It was still at the actual CPU _core_ level still a Deschutes Pentium II core, with the added cache.
The main reason the CPUs could overclock so well was because by the time the Celeron 300A came out, Intel had firmly "solved" the core speeds. Most of the Deschutes Pentium IIs could actually handle 450 MHz no problem, most of the 400 MHz were just downclocked not because they had to be, but to sell the cheaper model. That meant that the Mendocino Celerons based on the same core generally had no problem going much faster. The same basic Mendocino core was officially released at up to 533 MHz.
One of the reasons an overclocked 300A at 450 MHz did so well compared to a "full fat" Pentium II 450 MHz was that cache difference.
Sure, then Pentium II had 512K of cache, but it was running at 1/2 speed. The Celeron may have only had 128K, but it was running at full speed. At the time, many applications were just fine with 128K of cache, so that faster cache was better than more-slower.
Ah, the age old method of selling a chip slower to meet market demand.
The sheer amount of Northwood 1.8C that would do 2.4 without issue. Or all the slow clocking Core 2 chips that also went into the same 3.2-3.8 GHz range as the fast ones. And the dual core Athlons that could be unlocked into Phenom quads with a juicy 30% clock bump on top.
I so enjoy a good vintage pc build. 😎 Happy to send you some stickers/badges to add a finishing touch to that awesome NOS case.
Well, Colin already seems to know what's up. 🤓 Thanks, man!
The Celeron 300 was a BEAST! During that era I built 5 gaming systems for family and friends, ALL of them where Celerons. Local stores helped out, binning the Celeron chips for a $25 charge. This mean we KNEW the chip we bought was going to clock to 450Mhz with no issues. It was an incredible chip for the time.
Intel Celeron processors were also pretty popular for Dell laptops at the time. My high school were able to buy those computers with Celeron processors because they cheap for each one in the classroom.
Thank you for this lovely memory! Everyone was talking about it back then. The next amazingly overclockable Celeron was the Celeron D 805, maybe a project for the future?! Keep up the great videos you make and best wishes from Germany.
This brought back some good memories. I had a dual celery 366 overclocked to 550MHz ASUS BP6 build that was both my favorite and least favorite thing. Man, I wish I still had that system.
Oh the 300a. What a legend. We all had one. And from there, quite many celerons up to 700-900 Mhz before going to AMD with the Tbird.
Those old Trinitrons have just the most beautiful picture/color balance. When I worked for Disney in Florida they were liquidating Sony CRT monitors as low as $15 in the early/mid 2000s. I definitely bought a few.
In 2009 I bought a 35" Trinitron TV at a yard sale for $20. It had a beautiful picture and displayed laser disc playback flawlessly. Only problem was it weighed about 300lbs, almost crushed me moving into my man cave.
I grew up on Quake 3 on a P2-266. Dude your perseverance is incredible. I would have given up. Love how you were able to do everything with period accuracy. I wonder if the thermal paste was bad for your 300A and if you applied new thermal compound if that would have made a difference. Although like the poster below Costa Rica was easier to OC than Malaysia. It was fun going down memory lane seeing all that old hardware and software. Thanks for posting this video!
I've seen Slot 1 processors with zero paste, or even just a thermal pad. These machines came that way from the manufacture.
I was part of the Pentium II development team in assy specific to System Level test. Your video is spot on from the board, peripherals and even the OS setup to the Quake game. The Yamaha board playing the Passport MIDI was similar from my home PC setup😅. THANK you for this piece of nostalgia.
I bought a Celeron 300A system at the time they were launched in Europe. 300A; 64MB RAM; Riva TNT, Voodoo 2 12 MB, a SB Live 5.1 and a set of 5.1 Cambridge Sound Works speakers from Crreative.
My 300A wouldn't boot @ 450MHz. Then I put a 80mm fan from a server in front of the stock cooler, turn the pc on and it booted normally @ 450MHz. Run it like that until th system got replaced by an Athlon 2400+. I can't recall the motherboard model, but at the time we were using in all builds Asus boards with the 440BX chipset. The 440LX(?) was a crap chipset: worse performance and more buggy. The 440 BX was rock solid. The legendary status is well and truly deserved.
I got soooooo much mileage overlooking my 300A to 450mhz. It was the equivalent of a P2 450 with games.
Mhm falling a little short of P2 for sure. Faster cache is helpful, but not helpful enough to completely offset the penalty from having a quarter of the cache. Rule of thumb, doubling of cache gains 7% performance.
@@SianaGearz it's a bit of cache size vs cache speed. If something makes use of >128k then yes, the P3 was noticeably faster. but if it works fine with the small cache, the Celeron runs ahead.
All depends a bit on the task. I remember some tests during the core 2 era, where going from 512k to 1M gave about 15-20% and going to 2M gave about 20-30% in actual games.
But there are diminishing returns. In the same test, going from 3M to 6M gave only about 5-10%
Of course you had problems at first - you didn’t cut your finger on the case and blood-bond with the system.
That mouse. That's my favorite one. Ever.
Haha, I read this and immediately knew that it was going to be the Microsoft Intellimouse. Looked back and sure enough.
Did Microsoft ever make an optical mouse that looked like the classic Microsoft ball mouse that was right hand only.
I liked it's ergonomics over the intellimouse, which if I recall was ambidextrous.
Same! I didn’t know there was an actual fanbase for that mouse outside of me. I just built an ‘02-era XP rig (spec’d to the max inside my favorite tower- the translucent bezel’d Compaq 5000 series) last month and the 2-button Intellimouse was of course my pick.
@@volvo09 You're looking for "IntelliMouse w IntelliEye 1.0 USB PS/2 Compatible".
The ambi styled one you're thinking of was called "IntelliMouse Optical".
Very confusing naming right, both are actually optical.
I remeber Celerons being the chip everyone wanted for coverclocking. Oh the good old days. 😂
I had one of these. It was a overclocked to 450MHz and I paired it with a Creative Labs Voodoo Blaster Banshee. It was a hotrod gaming machine in 1999. The crazy part is that when it was obsolete, we just threw all that stuff in the trash without giving it a second thought.
I wish i kept my old PCs
I priced up a PII-450 back in 1998 and went to the local computer store to buy the components. The guy looked at my proposal and said "You don't want me to sell you that" and suggested a 300A which would overclock to 450 and save me a ton of money. Ran that PC for 3 more years, and it was rock solid the whole time.
Damn that Yamaha chip has some nice freaking bass.
300A@450 was a great time. Nostalgic even. Fun memories!
Few things came even close. Okay, perhaps the Conroe/Allendale Celerons, where a 1.6 GHz one would easily reach 3 GHz
Had a 300A that consistently ran at 450/100 on an Abit BH6-II without issue. BH6-II, and I'm sure other boards did this as well, had a the ability to bump up above 100 main bus thought I can't remember what it's max was. I do remember trying it occasionally with mixed results. The issue was always heat but with a good heatsink or even peltier module it would work for extended periods. Also one thing I noticed with yours was the "Costa Rica" on there. Back in the day when this was THE thing to do it was always recommended to get the "Malaysia" made ones. Something about them, maybe just a minor manufacturing/quality variance or something to do with that pin being "taped over" (figuratively speaking) from the factory? No idea but they worked. Damn I feel old now. 🤣
Ah this takes me back to the early 2000s when I was actually building PCs. Specifically, buying budget parts and then having to buy them again because they were either DOA or incompatible.
53 year old here. I remember those chips and absolutely loved them. Dont know if you have done a video yet on this but my best and most prized board and chips were on the Abit BP6 with VooDOo II. Would love to see you do a build with it.
Celeron 366 owner here. Bought the MSI bx440 mobo and cpu from NCIX guarenteed to overclock to 550 mhz. This was such an exciting period of time.... Every 6 months was a leap ahead, and hardware from a year ago was obsolete (i use a 10 year old computer now adays) .. Online gaming technical challenges were overcome (gamespy and good netcode) and reaching a golden age (counterstrike,starcraft,everquest). What a weird time go grow up: as i thought this rate of change was normal.
300A, what a legend. mine ran @ 450 for its life and spent a little time in the fast lane @ 504 as well.. BH6 of course :) it got replaced by a 733 celery clocked straight to 915 then 1.1ghz for its life as well 💪.. what a time that was to be working in the industry
It looks like your first Celeron 300A has multiple burnt traces / corroded pins. Or am I going crazy?
Those sticks of 128MB RAM also look crusty. Pins are very darkened and have oxidized.
Looks like pads carrying VCC Core rail show discolouration on the CPU daughterboard. It may have been continuously overvolted in the past.
I used to find these all the time back when i worked at a recycling yard, i was always curious what these were for. Great video! And thanks for the information!
I clearly remember that the '90s and early 2000s were incredible when it came to computer performance improvements. Every 6-7 months, computers became so much more powerful that new applications wouldn’t even run on the previous generation of PCs.
Today, I'm using all kinds of software on 10-year-old computers and on current ones, and there isn’t much of a difference in terms of performance.
To True. my Daily driver just celebrated her 12th birthday. Granted, it was top of the line when new, but I only paid $250 for it at auction. I dont play many PC games any more, and it handles my day-to-day needs without a hitch. Ive looked into custom building a more 'modern' rig a few times, but I simply cant justify the cost. 3D CAD performs flawless, and the more 'adult' things I need to do like Email and banking, well, they're always gonna work, just as long as its not laggy im happy. about the only thing it struggles with is reaaally high res video, but my screen cant to that anyway, and my eyes aren't that good for it to really matter.
I remember managing to Overclock my 266 MHZ Intel Celeron to 400 MHZ on my first PC back into like 1999. It booted Windows 98 without problems. ❤
I was 8 when I last built a system like this. The ribbon cables bring back memories of trying to troubleshoot why my hard drive didn't work. I had the wrong master jumper selected.
On the Genica page the top image was a CD player. That was the MPTrip. It was the first commercially available CD player that played MP3 CDs. I had one of those and it was world changing for an 18-year-old kid with their first car. No more having to swap out discs to change albums. I could store dozens at a time.
My first pc was on celeron 300, good old times ;( And my father bought me it because in some pc magazine there was an article, how to overclock it :) because there was no interner at my location in that time
I had a Celeron 300A that ran stable at 450MHz for years with just the stock heatsink. That computer was an absolute champ. Of all the A models, the 300A was the most commonly used for overclocking. There were extreme enthusiasts out there that were using peltier plates and phase change cooling methods. They were able to push the the 300A to a whopping 600MHz - twice the rated clock speed. There were even online forums that tracked successes and failures based on batch codes and manufacturing dates. It was a great time to be a computer geek.
13:48 When you accidentally misplace the vector square for your vent hole pattern and say screw it, it's a weird CE logo made of holes now.
I made a PC and bought a Celeron 533A (Tulatin) back when they were new and it overclocked nicely to 800MHz with only a 50mV increase in voltage. Which was less the CPU and more a motherboard thing as even non-overclocked it crashed randomly. But give it 50mV more (it was like 1.80 to 1.85V) made it rock solid. That too was a major overclock, and it too had half the cache of the Pentium III of the era (the 533A was based on a Pentium III core).
Haven't even started the video and I already know this is about the Celeron 300a and 333a. They were the GOAT Slot 1 Pentium II era.
EDIT: Seeing the struggles with the drives, this is why a lot of folks started looking to cards from Promise and High Point for their IDE controllers since they had better support for LBA32 (and later LBA48) drive support.
I was one of the few who ended up overclocking on a VIA chipset before I got a 440BX motherboard. The overall performance wasn't as good but the overclocking potential was insane. My 300A had the shrouded cooler on it, not the one in the video and it ran like lightning. If I was willing to accept occasional crashes, I could reliably get 540MHz out of it, and 504 was pretty much rock solid.
What you were seeing with the memory density on your motherboard is actually very common across all 440BX era boards, as they had trouble addressing high density memory modules. I've ran into this quite a few times even on my higher end MSI motherboard. The next evolution of Intel chipsets, the i810/815 resolved this issue to my knowledge BUT those were limited to only 512MB memory at maximum, rather than the potential 1GB on 440BX boards. The best way to get around this limitation was to acquire double-sided memory modules rather than the later single-sided SDRAM modules used by low-end boards from the P4 and Athlon XP era.
The i815 has another interesting memory limitation. It only supports 4 ranks, but most boards have 3 slots. So depending on how your sticks are set up, you might not be able to run a pair of 256M sticks or a 256M and a pair of 128M together.
When I saw the title of this video, I knew exactly which Celeron you were going to be talking about. I built about 40 of these overclocked Celeron 300A systems back in the day. Everyone of them overclocked fine to 450Mhz. IIRC there was one Intel plant that made these in lower quantities that didn't overclock as nice as the other...or something like that. The trick I used is that if you bought the 300A in the Intel retail packaging which included the Intel branded cooler, those were always from the good source and always overclocked to 450mhz super-duper easy. If you bought a bare processor without Intel cooler, you might get one from the other source and you had a chance of it not overclocking to 450mhz (although many did just fine). Again all of this is IIRC.
The Celeron 300a was a beast because the 128k Cache was on the cpu die, not on the slot-1 pcb at 1/2 clock divider. At that time, coding was still very tight and little if anything would fall out of the l2 on-die cache and hit the ram. If it stayed in that magic full speed 128k on-die cache it ran better by small margins due to lower access latency .. i loved my 300a .. simply an amazing cpu.
Beautiful video! It made me tear up. I miss my childhood and the amazing LAN parties. I was rocking a Celeron 700MHz for many years.
Had the 450 Mhz one and was really a gaming, emulation, and media editing BEAST for the price in that era. Used it even for a good part of the Windows XP era.
I had a Celeron 300A. Overclocked to 450, on the Abit BH-6. The overclocker wombo combo. Incredibly stable, cooling on them was honestly easy (especially compared to today). It was a dream. I That system served as a primary gaming rig for many years, didn't replace it until 2004 when I upgraded to run Doom 3. Even remember having an Nvidia TNT card, followed by an original GeForce. Good times. I kept the system going for years after that as a secondary, and did eventually have to bring it back down to 300, but that system was a rock.
I remembered building PCs to sell at eBay and as a computer technician at a computer retailer around this time. These Celerons were very popular.
Crazy thing was that you could do the overclocking with the Cyrix chips that were clocked at 50Mhz and use Amptron or other motherboards that have 66Mhz and 75Mhz to bump up the speed depending on the chip from 150Mhz to 225Mhz. Or 200Mhz to 350Mhz depending on the chip. Did noticed a big difference from 150Mhz to 225Mhz when playing a snes emulator running Super Punch Out that time. Golden era.
with zsnes I assume?
To get 450mhz out of a 300a you need to overvolt, and that can be achieved putting a tiny piece of tape on a certain pin of the CPU itself. It changed voltage from 2V to 2.2 and allowed the overclocking on pretty much all the 300As. Because of the 100mhz bus speed the 300a outperformed the p2 at same clock speed. Great memories of taping all my friends' CPUs 😅
I went one step further and bought 2 of the flip chip BGA variants, a couple of slot-1 converters and a dual slot motherboard. After soldering the bus arbitration pin from the socket to the edge connected. I had a dual 300A system running at 450mhz. A true beast. Triple booted into windows 2000, Linux and BeOS.
Good example of Silicon Lottery. I miss building PCs back in those days. It was a lot of fun.
good memories. The pentium 2 300 was my last computer with a massve gap inbetween till I built a Pentium 4 2,8 explicitly to play doom3. Totally skipped the P3 era but am now making up for it with an exploding in size collection, lol.
2:15 got to love that "cheap" 999$ just for the cpu
I bought a 300A based computer from a private builder in 1997 and I still have it and its my favorite computer. It had a asus p2b
The p2b came in a few revisions. The one I have right now has an over volt jumper to over bolt the cpu and stabilize over locking. Here were also versions without the jumper
Thanks for the nostalgia trip! I worked building computers back then and built many systems with similar specs. from what I can see the memory and the replacement optical drive was the only real thing you went with that was more than usual. Great video! You were correct. That board would not let you push power too much. The cheaper boards would trigger power protections at relatively low thresholds or straight up give up the magic smoke. The power delivery circuitry was much better on the higher end boards.
@ThisDoesNotCompute This is the reason why I love the P6 architecture, because of their power consumption and better performance.
One of the first pre-built computers my parents bought me was an generic eMachine...that happened to have a Celery 300A in it. Saved up for an Abit board and I ran that chip at 450 mhz for years, long after it was my daily driver it ran slackware linux iptables-firewall (back before you could just buy an off the shelf router lol) I got a good 7+ years out of that chip before retiring it. As far as yours went, you just lost the silicon lottery. The reason the celeron 300A's OC'd so well is because they were actually p2 450 chips that couldnt pass QC so they got binned for the Celerons. Yours probably had more issues than most and it just wasnt in good enough shape to run at 450.
I still have my best overclocked PC. It has a Celeron 566 on an Asus socket 7 slotket, plugged into a Gigabyte GA-BX2000. It ran my Win2000 advanced server for years at 850 MHz. That PC was a beast back in the day.
The original Mendencino and Coppermine 128 Celerons were great chips for the money.
I had both a 300A oc'd to 464 MHz and later a 566 Mhz model that oc'd to 875 MHz for quite a bit.
I love the ultra small celeron laptops, I have two of them and use one for field work. Recently I had one sitting outside for a week running headless with a GPS receiver and radio all powered via solar for some testing, worked great!
It still amazes me that PCs took off in the home market for how much they used to cost vs how little they did.
When you mentioned this could have been a (1998)$600 build back in the day? I think something this capable would have been the kind of thing to finally push me into it.
(For reference my first build was $290 for a Celeron G1610, 4GB RAM, 60GB SSD, and a Radeon 7770 1GB)
They didn't do little at all! They were quite capable, the software of the time was really quite impressive. Office software hasn't really gained any substantial capability since 1997. Photoshop already had not only layers but even smart layer effects, and with 64MB RAM you're editing an A4 page at 200dpi with a handful layers no problem, a little crunchy maybe. A pMMX is not really enough to do any DAW tasks, only fine for pure MIDI, but a P2 was already sufficient. But it's also to be said how good Cakewalk was at MIDI editing. And Quake 3 is as good as any eSports game ever. And of course that's the era of Internet Explorer 5. You could load up ICQ or Trillian and you'd have instant messaging with your friends and wouldn't feel a substantial impact on the system performance at all.
I had 3D modelled in 1997 in trueSpace 3 on a Pentium MMX, and raytrace rendered pictures; by end of 2001 i was using Blender 2.0 on an Athlon, a little later i had a Geforce2mx and was handling scenes with a million polygons and could render animations overnight.
For the most part, things don't even feel that much better today. The impressive growth of hardware performance was offset by decrease in software efficiency, except in select areas.
Think of any creative or productivity or entertainment task, and late 90s PC was able to do it, which is where they really took off, with Internet being a massive adoption driver as well.
@@SianaGearz I have a Coppermine 933 and that thing can play mp3 under DOS without issues.
Another former 300A owner here, ran it at 450MHz paired with a Voodoo3 3000 card. Many hours spent playing Quake3 and Unreal Tournament over LAN with friends on the weekends...
I remember my first build from scratch: a Celeron 300. I pushed the FSB just like you did and made a Celeron 450. Luckily, I did this in 2001 with ebay parts. I got a P2 upgrade second-hand eventually.
Would be interesting to see you trying some voltage mods on these older boards! Great work on your channel!
This does not compute on a Saturday morning. Nothing gets better than this.
You are definitely having an era correct PC build experience, complete with all the obstacles.
Worth noting that with simple utilities released by hard drive makers, you could get around the large hard drive thing. Just set the bios to anything manual, boot the utility floppy, and it would install something into the hard drive's MBR that would override BIOS calls and let it use the full size. The caveat was you couldn't boot directly from any boot disks afterwards and see the drive, so most had a little pause or indicator to push or hold down a key during hard drive boot to then boot from floppy. The Western Digital one wasn't hardware locked and could be used on any large drive.
Also (if you didn't just cut it for relevancy/time) be sure to install motherboard chipset drivers and double check to make sure the drive is operating in DMA mode. It could make a difference for AGP video performance as well.
I had a Pentium II system back in the day and had a similar problem when wanting to upgrade from a 5 GB disk to a 40 GB one. What fixed it for me was a simple BIOS update.
This build comes shockingly close to resembling my first computer (a gift for Christmas 1999 - thanks parents!). It had a Celeron 400, 64mb of RAM, and a Riva TNT 2.
Excellent video. But, again someone makes a video about 300A, or PII celerons. Nobody ever made a video about Coppermine based Celerons, who were also amazing overclockers. Yes they were just a little bit slower than Durons, but still amazing. I had Celeron 566 who worked @952 MHz for everyday use.
The Coppermine ones were almost a bit boring between the 300A and the Tualatin Celerons. Sure, they clocked well. As did the Core 2 based ones. But the Coppermine Celerons just weren't that huge as the 300A.
I had one of these chips, it was completely stable at even with my cheap motherboard (no extra voltage, no better memories, nothing, just increased FSB). I used it overclock constantly without issues. :)
2:33 oh my god, that is the best motherboard box I've ever seen. Eat your heart out ASUS ROG.
LOL
Someone thought they were being awfully clever by putting a snowboard on the cover of a box for a motherboard.
Serious flashbacks for that PC case, I had that one for years and it ran a Pentium II 233MHz as a home server for a good part of that time.
I got mine to 500 mhz back in the day. Astonishingly it seemed to operate at 450 perfectly, not just faster but even a bit cooler than stock! 500 pushed it as the temps would rise significantly. It seemed as if 450 was a natural state of these CPUs and yes it was super easy and rock solid. I built systems for friends and family based on these early celerons. All them had gone up to 450 mhz no problem.
I don’t remember what motherboard it was, but I had a 300a and simply putting in PC100 RAM it ended up overclocking itself to 450MHz (due to the multiplier with the faster front side bus). Loved it.
I got mine in the Socket 370 version, but my board was a slot 1 board. To get it to work, an adapter called a “Slocket” was used, which was basically a socket 370 on a daughterboard with a slot 1 edge connector. You even used socket 370 coolers on it.
The first Xeon processors also came out about this time and were absolutely massive things. Basically a really tall Pentium II to make room for the extra cache chips running at full speed.
If I remember correctly, OnTrack Disk Manager could override the BIOS's hard disk size. I believe you just set it to anything but auto so it works, then use that tool to utilise it's full capacity.
It's been a few decades since I've done that though, so don't ask for more details 😂
or jet the 32G jumper on the drive.
@@HappyBeezerStudiosthat might be an option as well, if you don't mind the lesser size.
The last PC I ever built was a Socket 370 Celeron 366 which I clocked to 550 on an Abit BE6-II. I don’t recall how much RAM I loaded. I do remember the ginormous Superpower Landmark case I put it in, though. 🤪 I ran Win95 with Litestep on it. I remember trying to make it run Linux (some version of Debian, IIRC, with KDE) and it completely choked.
Good times. Thanks for the memories. 😁
We did this in my computer class in 2006. We had like 30 computers built with intentional faults that we had to diagnose and a bunch of them were celerons.
The fault in my system was a "bad" IDE ribbon. I was supposed to find it by diagnosing unreadable sectors, but I took the side panel off first to check for loose connections and saw the cable was manufactured with about 3mm of one of the wires cut out right in the middle of the ribbon. Fixed it without ever booting up. 😂
Had a 300A with an Alpha cooler. It ran great at 450. Thanks for the video! 👍👍
I miss this era, and the games that came with it. Not hung up on the latest and greatest, still playing old games like Myst and lucasarts titles as well as new stuff. If it was good it got the seal of approval.
I love modern games, but there is something about this late 90s- early naughties era that brings back that warm fuzzy feeling. It makes me a tad emotional!
I sold computers back then and I sold 100's of those Celeron 300A systems with the BH6 board, whatever the newest Sound Blaster and ATI All-In-Wonder video cards were too.
That made a great computer back then! Every 300A I bought overclocked to 450Mhz, not one failed.
It was 1999, i had a 300A (made in Costarica if i remember) immediately set @ 463 (103 FSB) on a small Soyo BX board in AT form, fitting my old Pentium 133 case. Rock stable, coupled with a 3dfx Banshee, i was the king of the hill that summer!
For a min there i thought you where going to talk about the duel CPU celeron mod you could cobbel together. I'm still hopeing one youtuber will be able to pull it off as even i failed back in the day. But that was mainly to being a poor student and the MB i got being broken in postage and not being able to find another one that didn't cost an arm and a leg. If MB was ok all i had to do then was buy or "borrow" a copy of win NT 4.0 so i could use the dam thing for 3d rendering. Even with my hopes dashed it was still an extremely enjoyable video. Cheers.
I know that Cathode Ray Dude has implied that he's going there in the near future
I ran that configuration for a while myself at the time. I was a hard core Linux user already, so I didn't even need to change my OS to get to that SMP goodness
a lot of old harddrives had a 32GB Limit jumper. Then they worked fine on old mainboards.
I had a Celeron 300A running at 450 MHz for a a while a couple of years after they came out. It was given to me by a buddy that upgraded. I also had a real PII 450 and they were very close to each other. It's too bad yours didn't make it to 100 MHz FSB to see.
Anyways, thanks for the video. It was fun.
Loved my 300A at 464 on a BH6. Those were the days boy. It blows my mind that I can emulate a P2 and Voodoo3 on my 5800X3D to play all of those classics especially after downsizing in apartments and having to get rid of my DOS era boxen.
thanks for bringing back some good memorys mate
thank you
your building my 1st eq mechine
Yay! You've built nearly my identical PC from the late 90s, except I had a Celeron 333A that I overclocked to somewhere around 450mhz. The TNT card was amazing for Quake 3 Arena.