Price: $180+ street price for 766MHz, $115+ for 733MHz.

Availability: Now

AMD has held a clear performance and price lead in the value market with their Duron line for the past several months. While AMD has upped their speed all the way to 800MHz and uses a 100MHz DDR FSB, Intel has slowly raised their clock speeds, apparently more interested in serving the needs of their OEM customers than trying to win a value/speed war, which is why they have, prior to today, reached a relatively slow 700MHz with only a 66MHz FSB. In this same vein, Intel has just released 733MHz and 766MHz Celerons, adding two more speeds to their Celeron line and raising their top value processor speed by 66MHz while keeping the same 66MHz FSB.

We took the Celeron 766MHz, put it through our benchmarks, prodded it, poked it, and pushed it to see how it can perform. Does the Celeron 766MHz get the job done? Do the extra 66MHz close the performance gap? Read on to find out.

The current Celeron, also known as Coppermine 128, is essentially a Pentium III Coppermine series CPU with half of its 256k of L2 cache disabled, leaving it with 128k of L2 cache. The Celeron also loses the Pentium III's 100 and 133MHz FSB speeds, instead communicating with the chipset via a 66MHz FSB. In addition, the Celeron comes in lower clock speeds than the Pentium III. Still, both chips share the same SSE instruction extensions, architecture and technology. The Celeron and Pentium III are similar enough that they are even made from the same .18 micron die using aluminum interconnects. The Celeron comes packaged in the FC-PGA Socket 370 form factor and does not work with a Slot 1 motherboard without a socket adapter.