Without a doubt, the arrival of the Celeron class of CPUs back in April 1998 brought the most overclockable CPU product range the world had ever seen to market. Even the initial Celeron 266 was quickly found to be overclockable to 400MHz a large majority of the time.

But the cream of 1998's CPU crop was without a doubt the Intel Celeron 300A. Sporting 128Kb of full speed on-die L2 cache, the 300A served as a warning to AMD and the general public that the Celeron was a "handicapped" or "castrated" CPU no longer. Its benchmark speeds easily matched a true-blue Intel Pentium 2-300's for a price that was more than 30% lower. And as far as the Celeron 300A's overclocking ability was concerned, well, does the word "legendary" mean anything to you? We doubt that there will ever be a CPU that can be so dramatically overclocked while maintaining its life span and system stability. Overclocked Celeron 300As made it easily to 450MHz with the right cooling and system setup, which allowed them to match the performance of Intel's desktop flagship, the P2-450.

Best Mainboard of 1998...