Budget CPU Upgrades: Intel's Celeron 766

The Celeron immediately hops back to its original position ahead of the Pentium III 500E under MDK2.  The MDK2 test is not nearly as intensive as Quake III Arena, in terms of the stress it puts on the Celeron’s FSB and memory buses, thus allowing its clock speed advantage to kick in and give it close to a 10% advantage over the Pentium III 500E. 

The Duron continues to dominate as does its older brother, nothing out of the ordinary there.  Even as a gaming platform the Duron puts the Celeron to shame, it wasn’t long ago that the Celeron was doing the same to AMD’s previous flagship, the K6-III.  What goes around, comes around, and it’s definitely making AMD one happy camper. 

At 1024 x 768 x 32, the performance standings remain relatively unchanged, illustrating that MDK2 isn’t as quick to limit performance as the Quake III Arena tests we just finished analyzing.