> Our Linux box does some heavy duty floating point maths, but, like
> everyone, we have a limited budget.
[...]
> We can buy a much faster celeron chip for the price and overclock them
[....]
> to main memory without the cache's. We will be running 100MHz
> motherboards so we think the smaller difference between cpu and main
> memory speeds will offset this to some extent.
The above statements seem to be in conflict a bit;
You have a limited budget, but are willing to over-clock the processors to
at least 350 MHz to run the bus at 100 MHz. And risk destroying them. If
you can afford to do it at least twice can you afford to do it right the
first time? How many times are you going to replace Celerons before
going to P-II's? The 266 P2 is just a bit more than 50% more expensive
than the 266 Celeron at wholesale. The 300 is a little more than 100%
more expensive, but the 300 Celeron isn't widely available yet. We're selling
a lot of 266 P2's because it is a sweet spot with respect to price/performance.
(I don't have a board in front of me, and haven't read much on the
Celeron beyond the material that led us to believe that they would
generate more complaints than they are worth. You may be able to run the
bus at 100MHz with a 266/300/333 clock speed, but the odds for failure are
probably considerable.)
Now, if you do run the bus successfully at 100 MHz (keeping in mind that
none of the BX chipset boards are listed as "Celeron ready", whatever that
implies.) you have to use more expensive DIMMs than running a Celeron in
Celeron mode. Our cost on PC-100 DIMMs varies from about 50% to 100% more
than ECC SDRAM, depending upon the size DIMM. 128 MB DIMMs are about 50%,
64 and 32 MB DIMMs are in the 100% range. So there is an increased
cost for RAM by going to 100 MHz (the BX chipset boards *will not*
boot with "normal" SDRAM DIMMs) Also, BX chipset motherboards are more
expensive than LX chipset motherboards.
I don't intend to be antagonistic or confrontational, I just want to make
sure that you've looked beyond the comparison of processor prices to try
and determine the total cost of implementing an overclocked Celeron
configuration as opposed to a Pentium II configuration. Off the top of
my head I think you'd probably find a P2 266 on an LX chipset board to be
a good value without the risk of frying processors.
Good luck, let us know how things work out.
--Kit
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