Had the 333 (same core as the A) managed to get it to 500mhz on a dodgy PC-Chip board, that sometimes would identify it as 450mhz and sometimes as 500mhz but when you used software in windows it would allways say 500mhz, was a great cpu :)

Never had Celerons at home, but i have a less known real king. A K6-2 200, which worked at 416 (83x5) at standart voltage! More than 100% overclock!

Ah, the Celeron 300A was a thing of beauty when I was in college. Back around 1997/1998, I was in a computer user's group at the college I was going to, in the Chicago area, and our group got some funding which we ended up using to upgrade all of our computers. I want to say at least half of our systems got an ABIT BH6 motherboard and a 300A. All of them were overclocked to 450 without any issues. Some of them even got the famed "Celery sandwich" cooling. At one point, we ended up going 'balls out' and built a dual Slot-1 system with two 366 CPUs, both overclocked to 550. Those were fun days.

my 300A was operating at 450mhz for years, and it still runs like a dream. simpler times :)

I still have my 300a with me, awesome little guy! I remember this CPU fondly-it was the first PC I ever assembled by myself. As a sidenote, it irks me a bit when people assemble "1998 dream builds" and use the p2-450. I mean, I understand it was the priciest CPU available at the moment, but if you look at available CPUs the p2-450, celeron 300a and celeron 333 came out at the same time. An overclocked 333 wipes the floor with the p2! There weren't even official 500MHz parts at the moment! That's the CPU that should be in a 1998 dream build.

Man, this brings back memories. 450 Overclock out of the box. Played Quake III with an Nvidia TNT II. This was the beginning of 3D gaming.

Around 1998 my boss (lokal computer store / still a close friend) had this CPU. Allways overclocked to 450Mhz. Due to the lack of money back then, it was the fastest PC compared to all his coworkers. I was stuck to a 233Mhz Pentium MMX Voodoo1 later Voodoo 3 2000 PCI (Still have that exact card :) ). If i recall correct the Celeron was the CPU of his choice for a really long time. At last, when I coud afford an Athlon 550Mhz he got "jealous" and bought something more powerfull :) . Memories, those where the days ... Nice vid Phil, as allways. Thank you

Ah, the memories. I was at uni back in those days and I basically had the fastest desktop computer on campus for not too much money. I remember sanding down until copper shone through, applying artic silver paste, and mounting some beast of a fan on top. Colour-coded cable tubing, LEDs all over the place, those were the days. I'm in my 40s now and haven't touched the inside of a computer (upgrading RAM / SSD / wireless in a laptop doesn't count) for over a decade, but I have fond memories of the 300A.

On my ABIT BH6, I was able to reach 454MHz. Those were good times!

I had dual celeron 300As in a dual slot motherboard at a software company I worked at. The 300As were made NOT to work in a dual processor motherboard, but with some mods, we got it done. Fun times.

Thanks for bringing back great memories. I had built myself an ABIT BP6 with two Celeron 300A processors overclocked back in 2000 and it was so impressive. I kept that system for a good few years before finally upgrading to a dual P-III motherboard (ASUS P2DB). I remember driver support under Windows was problematic back in those early days of multiprocessing, with the Creative audio drivers being particularly prone to locking up. Of course, with the advent of multicore CPUs become the norm thanks to the Core 2 generation, we no longer have that issue as most drivers are written to be thread-safe.

I had a 300A on the Abit BH6. It ran @464MHz for years. You can get a slightly higher FSB of 103MHz when you enable the turbo mode in the CPU softmenu.

I used a pair of 300A CPUs on an Abit BP6 motherboard in the early 2000s to run a 16 player Team Fortress Classic server on Windows 2000. The machine also hosted my web and ftp servers. It could host a full game server, some web traffic, a couple of FTP users downloading maps AND perform a full tape backup to a SCSI tape drive without lagging. It ran great until about 2006 when the capacitors started failing, a sad day indeed.

I had a 333 like +HPZeta back in college. Diamond Voodoo card and headed to the Quake Death Match and CTF parties :) Was a great budget build. I might still have it in the storage room.

The Celeron 300A, a ABIT BH6, 32MB of PC-66 SDRAM and Creative 3D Blaster 3dfx Voodoo Banshee (AGP, 16MB SGRAM) was my first custom PC build. I'll never forget going to that computer show with my Dad and Grandpa and crying* for the parts. -- It worked and we went home with the parts plus a generic white case that came with a 300w PSU (case had a black strip covering then LEDS and wave like holes for ventilation). -- I put it together that night with some generic VGA card, 500MB HD, 2x CD-ROM and SB16 from my previous 486SX2 IBM Aptiva. It wasn't until a few months later that we went to CompUSA and got the Banshee and a 8GB Maxtor ATA33 HD. Love the videos Phil, looking forward to more and seeing your channel grow! *I was 11. :P

So cool to go through these older Celeron and Duron videos again.

The first time I overclocked a CPU was the Celeron 300A. Great memories of this chip.

Awesome! Thanks for making another overclocking video, I'm glad you take your fans suggestions so seriously. It's really great.

OH WILL YOU JUST PUT THE COOLER ON ALREADY?!?!?!

When i was young (i think about 11 or 12) i built a dual celeron 300A and overclocked them both to 550MHZ. It was the most amazing system i ever had.... Then we moved, and it got thrown away, or stolen when we moved :\ It was such a rad system. I believe it was the Abit BP6 motherboard....yeah

I'm at the edge of my seat watching that go into the plastic chassis! Love your video's Phil. I'm doing a bit of a Phil's Lab binge atm.

This brings back so many memories. I had a bh6/300A combo back in the day. 450mhz OC was rock solid and i had a great time building and gaming on that system. Eventually i did get a peltier plate and built a custom cooler for it. It would OC as high as 558mhz if i remember correctly. I bet its still in my parents house somewhere... sweet memories!

a slocketed Celeron 300a with a gorb on a BH6 was how I migrated from my ss7 k6-2 350. the mvp3 chipsets with the nvidia cards were such a pain in neck.

I loved my 300A!!! I jumped from a 120Mhz Pentium, to a 300A. It was a huge upgrade for me.

i wanted to say that i really enjoy your videos and they are nice to watch

running psemu was a dream on this machine back then.

I think this CPU was one of the best "bang for buck" deals, when overclocked it basically matched the much more expensive P2 450. The P2 had the edge only in some professional CAD programs and such but for gamers it was a waste of money.

Thanks for the very informative video Phil. I just put this cpu into my 'late DOS/Win98SE' build and am very happy with the system all in all.

I recently found a Pentium II 266 that I put in a 440BX board and because the board was set to 100Mhz bus, the 266 simply overclocked itself to 400MHz. On stock voltage, 100% stable. I was amazed, I'll tell you that.

happy you were able to try out this processor and see just what everyone's been talking about.

Thanks Phil, keep em coming

put it on water cooling and faster ram it'll do 500mhz+ if you use PC133 ram you can hit just shy of 600Mhz

I had one of these in the dual abit board overclocked to 450 running nt4. Those were the days!

This was the greatest overclocking cpu of all time. I used to run a pair of them SMP and voltage modded at just over 500mhz. Way faster than a Pentium 2 and it's 66mhz bus

OMG my first computer build was a DUAL Celeron 300a overclocked to 450mhz, with a voodoo2 card. That thing was a beast. Wish I still had it. I don't overclock anymore because you just don't get the gains that used to be possible.

In 1998 or 1999 I had one of these but I had chosen an Intel BX motherboard with no possibility of overclocking via BIOS. Thankfully some genius discovered covering one or two pins with nail polish tricked the BIOS into thinking it should run at 100MHZ FSB. You have no idea how overjoyed I was to see that work, having a high end PC for the pittance I was making in high school.

I had one back in the day. It ran at 450 with a moderate voltage bump. It was great! Legend

I love watching these videos about the hardware of the late 90s, even if it's not exactly an era that interests me in retro computing. I'm more of the DOS and earlier guy, dreaming of one day owning a Commodore 64 and all peripherals ;P Regardless, you always put out quality content Phil and make learning and watching videos absolutely easy and fun, not to mention you've inspired me on several projects. I can't wait to see what you've got coming up next!

I miss the socket 775 days where you could take a cheap cpu & motherboard and o.c and have fun with them.

My first computer in 1999 was a Mendocino core based Celeron 466 manufactured by eMachines. That PC had a lot of shortcomings, but the CPU wasn't one of them. The Mendocino cores were fantastic for the day. Despite their bad reputation, they really were good CPUs. That small cache was more than compensated for by the fact the cache ran at full speed. And you could overclock the hell out of them, too (just not with my eMachines).

The best part about your videos is your accent when saying cache. "Caish". I love it. Thanks Phil =)

I still have my 300a around here someplace. i ran mine at 450mhz the entire time I used it.

My first machine was actually built using a 466A, with a Slot-1 adapter on a 440LX board. I never attempted overclocking, but man it was such a great machine for the build I had (64MB PC66 memory, Hercules 3d Prophet-II MX 32MB, 13.6GB IDE drive, 32x CD drive, and SB Live! X-Gamer). First machine I did online gaming with in UT. Was a pretty damned good system for its time.

Great video. Never had these ones it was the later Celerons I got to know. Need to look into it again.

Push it harder! We know this thing is more than capable of providing a 100% overclock.

My Abit BP6 Dual Celeron 300a @ 550mhz was my most favorite machine as a kid, i felt like a king at 12 years old

I had the 300A @450 back in the day, as far as I remember paired with a Voodoo 3 3000. These were the best PC-gaming days I can remember ...

I still have my 300a in a drawer somewhere, what an awesome CPU at the time! I set my front side bus from 66Mhz to 100Mhz and the CPU was at a 450Mhz overclock on a “Chaintech” motherboard I had and it was rock solid. That with my I think TNT2 video card and at the time I had a Sony CD-R that took caddy’s, oh man.. I was in heaven! God that was over 20 years ago.. where has the time gone?!

I had a beast of a 300a back in the day. I had mine stable at 550 and with some very creative "extreme" cooling I managed 733mhz on it in an overclocking contest with my coworkers. Sadly I was beaten by an AMD K6 III 500 that hit 750... None of the overclocks we achieved were stable, it just had to post and remain on long enough to snap a pic. I think the highest stable OC I got on mine was 600mhz but it was VERY toasty and even with my beastly custom cooler on it I was nervous it would burn out so I dropped the voltage and set it back to 550 where it stayed for about 4 years before I gave it to a friend :) Still my my favorite CPU I have ever owned.

Dude, you just helped me identify one of my old chips I've started collecting. I knew it was a Celeron, but I was making guesses after that. One of my best non-hardware finds​ was a boxed OS/2 Warp set.

my game computer Last Millennium was Celeron 300A @450. great value of money back days. i still have that prosessor. great memory.

I had one of these, somehow I made it run at 525MHz with a giant golden orb cooler and some 120mm fans. My PC sounded like a hovercraft and I thought it was awesome :) PCs were fun back then.

I got excited seeing these benchmarks. Smashes even a PIII450 in many tests. What a future-proof processor.

I don't think I was even alive when this was the thing

My Celeron 400A (from my first ever PC) thanks you for this review! :-)

Great stuff :)

I loved that beast back in a day. :)

I loved my K6-3 400 that I'd clock to 550mhz, and it was beating my buddies P3-500 in games! :) Now I am grown up, and can buy the best! :)

I still have my receipt from the now defunct frys electronics for my celeron 300a.

thanks Philip i found one in my shead and works ok now i got one of those sd to ide converters and it flys now with that to ill try jacking it up its the 450 one i have

I still have my 300A running in a 'celery sandwich' configuration, with the OEM heatsink on the backside, and an Alpha 100x100x40mm heatsink on the front side. I was able to run it at a stable 527MHz, but I turned it down to 504MHz because I wanted it to last longer. I actually just pulled it out of the closet today and fired it back up, and after dusting and wiggling connections, it seems to be back again!. I can't find any of my hard drives that used to be in it, otherwise I'd crank up some QuakeII and have a blast!

I ran the 300a on an abit BH6 mobo too. It was so nice hanging with the $250 PII guys with my $60 celery. I used a homemade copper crossdrilled waterblock for cooling.

Those Celerons had no problem working in SMP. Wonderful for Overclock AND dual CPU. It was wonderful

First PC I every built by myself was a 300A with an A-Bit BH6 motherboard. It served me well for years. 450-500mhz were where I ran it at most of the time. I eventually updated to a coppermine P3 with a SLOT1 to Socket 370 adapter.

I once had a Celeron D that overclocked from 3.33ghz to 5.15ghz on a custom air cooler, (the motherboard eventually broke after about 6months from the weight of the cooler.) I used ghetto cooling, I stuck the case in a window in the wintertime. 😁

Really liking these Celeron videos Phil. I'd love to see you run some tests on the Socket 370 ones. Those were the ones that seemed to have the worst reputation, specifically the 800Mhz Coppermine version that was in so many pre-built systems back in the day. Keep up the awesome work man!

Had one of these back in the day and I had it overclocked to 450 MHz. Friends who forked out a bundle for the then top of the line PII 450 were pissed that I had a processor that beat theirs in every way at 1/4 of the price. Paired with a TNT2, I used this setup for a couple of years until I finally upgraded the CPU to a PIII 850, which was the top speed my motherboard would support.

This type of stuff is what I live for. The times when Celeron was actually good!

So many good memories. My first system build in mid-1998 was the C300A with the same motherboard you used, the Abit BH6. It was a killer combo. The rest of the system I built was weaker because I was a poor student, so I could only afford 64MB RAM (which cost $100 in those days), a Creative Ensoniq ES1371 sound card and an ATI Rage Pro video card, 6GB Maxtor drive and a Lucent PCI winmodem (which bit me in the ass not long after when I started dabbling in Linux as winmodems were useless). I overclocked it right away to 450, and then to 464 (103x4.5) without any voltage increase. With some extra voltage it ran stable at 112x4.5=504MHz. The year after I was able to afford an extra 128MB RAM for a total of 192, an extra HDD and a better modem for my Linux endeavors. And some time after that a TNT2 (Guillemot Maxigamer). All in all, that was the system that I used for a total of 4-5 years or so, until I switched to an Athlon XP build with GF4Ti4200. I still have both of those systems, and dust them off every once in a while for some retro fun. I never really went back to Intel after that build - all my mainstream desktops since then have been AMD based.

My 300A still runs at 450 with stock voltage to this day, I even ran it in my home server at 450 24/7 for a few years, great CPU.

I would not say that it is necessary (pricewise) to overclock a celeron cpu. But if I was aiming at machine with processing power within its grasp, I would definetly go for it - just for the fun of it. You see - I found out recently that building these things is much more fun then using them later. I've been around computers since early 8bits - strangely enough I still don't have that much nostalgia for old games and their period hardware. I love to build and make it work but then the fun stops and I usualy don't know what to do with the machine. At least for me - emulation on a modern hardware seem to suffice - if and when I have the craving for an old game... Building old stuff is a different story - that brings the real joy.

Haha my first computer had a 300A paired with an ABIT BH6 Rev 1.0. Was a great computer. I still have the 300A sitting in a box somewhere but had to get rid of the rest of the computer. A total overclocking beast, it was great.

I had a celeron 633 overclocked to 900. It was running great.

I had back in the year 2000 Cel 333A but board with no core voltage adjustment, I thing it was 440LX chipset. I have made voltage core increase by simple isolating of the pins on CPU slot with nail polish, than I was able to reach 500 Mhz on it. PS. Great channel, keep going!

What a beast of a chip. Very cool. If only modern celerons were like this nowadays

I still have my 300A. It was the first pic I saved and purchased on my own in highschool. I actually have been Bering my old PC's up to my office from storage lately and going through them one by on and man did I make some odd modifications in college to turn this into a Linux server on the school intranet

Cool! I had one of these but never felt guilty.

This is the reason I loved the old Celeron and Duron processors back in the day. With some fiddling you could get the same performance as the top of the range model, or maybe even more! Good times :)

From memory there was a slight boost option in the BIOS of the Abit BH6 that would take the 300a from 450MHz to 464MHz. Along with my overclocked Nvidia TNT2 Ultra and an Aureal Vortex 2 soundcard (Diamond Monster MX300). Loved that computer.

I had a 500mhz celly @ 800ish cooled with a golden orb HS/F back in the day. Good times.

Here's another Celeron that overclocks like a champ. E3300. I had a Asus P5KPL AM SE motherboard. I managed to get it to just a bit under 3200mhz from 2500 by just messing with the FSB, probably even more if i had raised the voltage. The temperature increase was there but quite small. It had an "aftermarket" cooler , identical to the stock one, just a bit bigger.

I had a 300a @ 450 on a gigaabyte board for years, probably lasted me about 4 or 5 years, then I had a couple of athlons and a couple of p4 northwoods, then got the next awesome overclocker of a pentium e2140 which lived its life at 3ghz and lasted ages as well.

Yeh, first computer I bought (Packard Bell) had an intel Celeron processor in it. Worked like a charm in that time period and software. Few years later it quickly became absolute.

Aaah such memories , probably the best overclocking CPU I've ever had(in terms of performance gain) , mine was a belter , also had it in an Abit BH6 but it ran quite comfortably at 500mhz(499.5) at 111fsb , also had it in a "celery sandwich" using two coolers bolted through the slot card , if I was to build a slot 1 I think I'd have to do it with a 300A just for the nostalgia.

NIce you did a video for it. As I said some months ago. I loved the celeron A over a p2. It was better in games (at least for me)

It was my dream to build a dual CPU Celeron system using these 300As. You would take nail polish and paint one of the pins so it would disable the dual-cpu check and you could use 2. By the time I saved up enough for the CPUs and the dual socket board the socketed athlons were released and were cheaper and faster and all the cache was on chip. Maybe the dual cores would have been nice but back then a 700MHz socket athlon was a better buy

I used to have one of these - I kept it for ages because it was so competent. I still remember it. As he other commentators point out, if you put tape over pin B21 you fooled the motherboard into thinking it was a Pentium II 450, with less-but-faster cache. I never bothered to overclock it beyond that. I remember that memory and hard drive prices dropped at roughly the same time the Celeron 300A came out, so it seemed like a major step-change at the time. Off the top of my head I completely skipped the Pentium 3 because the gain wasn't worth the cost, and moved to AMD when the Pentium 4 came out because the P4 seemed like a bad deal.

good job!

Who does not remember the good 'ole days of the $80 Celeron 300a running at 484 MHz on a 440BX chipset!

Great video, old times returned. Very good processor. Next good Celeron is Celeron II 533Mhz and next 566Mhz. My own act of 825mhz and 850Mhz.

Celeron on the wolfdale core are the best oc of them all. An e3200 with it's stock cooler and voltage will run at 3,3-3.6 ghz at amazing temps, bellow 55 in full load and it will be as fast as an E8300. I saw chips from that series even at 3.9 ghz with a good air coller, never further probably is the cache clock limit. I felt like a sucker back in the day with my expensive E7200 clocked at 3.16ghz. Another contender is the CeleronD.

ABIT BX6, BX6 2.0, and BH6, VP6, and BP6 boards were really great. I had to settle for a BH6 as I couldn't get a BX6 board anywhere back in the day without a long wait. The BH6 only could use 384MB Ram vs the 1GB that the BX6 could use.

I had a chance to buy slot1 Celeron 333. Motherboard A Trend ATC 6310 The bus was set to 110. The processor was started on the 115 bus, but Windows was hanging on boot. To prevent the BIOS from dropping the bus frequency, we had to isolate the B21 contact on the slot.

I had this. Awesome piece of hw. Kept it until I got a P3 450 (Katmai, Slot-1 as well). Later came the FC-PGA 667 Cel etc. had to use an adapter.

nice video as always, do you have any plan to make a video about AMD Duron?

The Celeron 300A was the dream CPU of the time because when properly cooled it would clean the floor with everything else. The best card to use with it was the Abit BH6 rev.1.1 because you could overclock its front side bus on a MHz basis and really push these babies, also they had rock solid SDRAM stability : you could overclock your RAM and reduce the timings as much as you wanted and it would still run. I had a rev.1.0 so I had to content myself with the 'pure' 450MHz overclock - the 'turbo' extra 2.5 MHz FSB would push the CPU to 460MHz, but mine would become slightly unstable even with extra voltage, so I would run it 24/7 at 450 with an undervolt - 1.92V ran perfectly. My brother had the exact same setup, but he was very lucky with his chip : his ran at 1.75V even under overclock. The Celeron 500 was far more touchy, eventhough it was essentially identical to the 300A. These chips could in theory all reach 500MHz, however in practice very few could; as such, buying a 333 usually yielded far less O/C success than the 300A and was more expensive. A sweet machine at the time was getting a workstation/server board with an AGP bus : these processors could actually run in dual socket configurations. Provided you ran Windows NT or Linux, this allowed you to have a powerful dual core on the cheap.

Had a socketed 300A and a socket to slot 1 adapter, so mine was probably a newer model and by that time it was pretty cheap. The adapter came with a jumper setting between 66 and 100 FSB too, no need to mod the bios.

Damn that felt terrible, I had this exact CPU back in the day, but couldn't get it to run at 450! Only 337 at most (with the 75 MHz system bus). Maybe due to a crappy motherboard (VIA-based cheap Tomato BX98-3D).

I had one of these in ... what was it? An ABit board I think?? One of those that gave overclockers all kinds of options. At one point I had it with two Voodoo boards in SLI mode. I was running massive fans on that setup but it let to some serious nerdgasms.

The cacheless Celeron 266/300 were great gaming CPUs, but the lack of L2 made performance subpar for anything else. It was about the same as a Pentium would have been at the same speed. I have a Celeron 266 lying around. Those could hit 448 easily on a board with a 112 MHz bus setting. The 300A, as your benchmarks show, was the equal of a P2-450 on just about anything. The fact it has a smaller cache was offset by the fact it was faster. And in gaming it never mattered much anyway.