There is an old adage that bluntly states, "Nothing in life is free". Unfortunately, this is usually the case, but every so often a situation arises in which you can get much more than originally bargained for. Care for a piece of advice? Take advantage of these situations whenever possible, because they don't surface very often. In the computer industry, overclocking is one of the easiest ways to maximize spending and possibly turn an average buy into an outstanding bargain.

An informed overclocker has a general idea of how much performance can be squeezed from any processor even before testing it. Word of the Celeron 300 @ 450 and Celeron 366 @ 550MHz spread quickly when it was discovered that a high percentage of these CPUs would run reliably with a 100MHz front side bus. It's been a while since the overclocking community has seen such jewels, mainly because of the ever-increasing clock multipliers but as yields improve and core quality increases, the possibility of another overclocking gem remains viable.

The recipients of our affection will be Intel's new Celeron 700 and AMD's Duron 700MHz CPUs - the fastest value processors on the market. Priced at around $130 for the Celeron and $85 for the Duron, speed comes fairly inexpensively. Since both systems make use of PC133 memory, we won't have to worry about pricey RDRAM to achieve top-notch performance either. Additionally, we've found the FSB of Intel's i815E to be rather lenient for overclocking, so we've selected ASUS' CUSL2 as our Celeron benchmarking platform. Sadly, the situation isn't quite as bright for AMD's Duron, as the EV6 bus has never provided much overclocking overhead. Coupled with the multiplier-locked core of many Duron CPU's, overclockers are seemingly stuck between a rock and a hard place. We were fortunately able to obtain an unlocked processor to use in conjunction with our ASUS A7V KT133 test bed.