Celeron Is King

It is official since last week, Intel is currently not planning to implement a bus clock lock into their Celeron processors, which means that EVERYONE can overclock Celeron to run with at least 75 instead of 66 MHz bus clock. The risk is less than minimal and at the same time you don't need to jump on the 'I have the longest'-trail, telling you about overclocking Celerons to some stupid 550 MHz and more. There is no reason for buying Pentium II anymore, you can even run the Socket370 Celerons as dual processors now! Plug them into a modified Slot1-converter card (like e.g. MSI's MS-6905), as described by Tomohiro Kawada at http://kikumaru.w-w.ne.jp/pc/celeron/index_e.html .

Intel is offering a cheap and very well performing processor line, the Celeron. Intel wants to fight AMD with those CPUs, they certainly don't want to jeopardize Pentium II sales. Marketing campaigns and the support of the OEMs (who are smelling the strong taste of lots of money) are supposed to make sure that Pentium II-sales remain untouched. Don't let them get away with it! Also consider AMD and the K6-3 as a player that well deserves to get into the high-end system lines. This should also result in a strong signal to the motherboard-makers, so that they will stop supplying us with crappy Socket7 and Socket370-boards.

Graphics Cards In Complete Systems

I could continue with this and get over to the graphics cards you find in the different systems. Why do you think was ATI so successful last year? Certainly not because they weren't able to supply any new 3D chip, whilst NVIDIA and 3Dfx launched two new 3D-chips in 1998. ATI supplied huge amounts of cheap low and mid-range graphics cards for those beautiful low-end systems. Not that it would have made a huge price difference if OEMs would have plugged some well-performing graphics cards into those systems, but after all the people still bought it, and OEMs are not beneficially minded, they want to make as much money as possible. ATI was the perfect partner for this and nobody can blame them at all. I'd rather salute them for an extremely smart business model.

May The Best One Win!

All you complete-system buyers, please take the time and inform yourself properly, so that you can fight the marketing hypes of Intel and the large OEMs. It's not nice to see Canopus retreat or AMD suffer for no real reason. Let the best solution win, not the one with the loudest speaker.

Blurb Over

Phew, it seems as if I was a bit passionate today. The plan for this Monday Blurb was to include flat panels, SGI's new high-end systems, the new blessings USB and IEEE1394. I guess this will have to wait until later. I'll go and grab a nice Weissbier now. I'm in Munich right now and it is the best place for that! Cheers! :)