> 1) Does anyone know the preformance of a 266 Celeron, VS a 266 MMX P1 vs a
> 266 P2
The Celeron 266 [and all slower, and Celeron 300's that aren't 300A] have NO
level 2 cache, so I suspect would get severely NAILED on Mersenne performance.
The Celeron 300A and all 333 and above have 128K of level 2 cache thats full
core speed, so perform quite comparably to the similar clock speed Pentium-II
systems (which have 512k of level 2 cache which is 1/2 the core speed).
retail Celeron systems however often use the severely deficient 440EX chipset
instead of the 440BX, this can impact performance (plus they have very few
expansion slots).
> 2) I am buying a new PC, does the Celeron hurt preformance so badly to not
> be effective?
If you get a celery 300A on a decent 440BX motherboard, not at all.
Performance is excellent. In fact, if you populate said 440BX with 100MHz
capable PC100 SDRAM, there's a very good chance you can get it working
reliably at speeds upwards of 450MHz. The various system wide benchmarks I've
seen floating around the net indicate this combination will run just as fast
as a pentium-II at the same clockspeed.
-jrp
