It was everyone's hope that the Celeron II line would operate on a 100MHz system bus, giving the value line significantly more punch. Unfortunately, we all know that the antiquated 66MHz setting lives on, serving as a thorn in the sandal of Celeron users worldwide.

In order to measure the effect of this front side bus limitation, we're using SiSoft Sandra to benchmark memory bandwidth. In addition, we can see how the CPU performance scales to the core frequency increase.

As expected, the CPU performance is balanced fairly consistently across the board. Memory bandwidth, on the other hand, fluctuates heavily. Since the initial front side bus setting is 66MHz, we see less than mediocre performance, transferring 246/271MB/s. This system's bottleneck shouldn't be too difficult to pinpoint.

At the top end, where we were able to reach 85MHz, theoretically available bandwidth has risen to 271/297MB/s. While this is still fairly poor compared to systems running at 100 or 133MHz, a CPU clocked at 892MHz is nothing to sneeze at, and should even deliver some solid gaming numbers.