Luckily, the new S370 Celerons are as overclockable as the current Slot-1 Celeron and Pentium 2 CPUs are. That is to say that they're indeed clock multiplier locked, or "clock-locked" but are NOT front side bus or FSB speed locked yet.
Simply put, this means that a user has the following overclocking options available to them when they explore the S370 Celeron 366's limits:
Stock: 5.5 x 66MHz = 366MHz
5.5 x 75MHz = 413MHz
5.5 x 83MHz = 456MHz
5.5 x 100MHz = 550MHz*
5.5 x 103MHz = 567MHz*
*Requires 440BX-based S370 mainboard
As you can see, there are still plenty of options to consider when overclocking the S370 Celeron 366, provided that your S370 equipped mainboard is based on the 100+MHz FSB capable Intel 440BX AGPset.
The ace of all the upcoming S370/440BX mainboards that we've seen appears to be yet again from "The overclocker's friend" ABIT, as their BM6 S370 board includes their now famous Soft Menu II CPU controls complete with voltage selection. Sharkyextreme spoke with Abit's representatives last week, and they confirmed that the company is nearing the ship date for the BM6 mainboard. Expect it within the next few weeks with a little luck.
The two S370 Celeron 366 OEM CPUs that we tested for this article (with the 440LX Soyo SY-6ILA mainboard) easily overclocked with only minimal cooling to the 5.5 x 83MHz (456MHz) level. Again, since the SY-6ILA was the only S370 board in our possession last week, it precluded us from pushing the Celeron 366 past the 83MHz FSB maximum speed of the 440LX chipset.
Part 2 of this article will address the true overclockability of the S370 Celeron 366 CPU at FSB speeds of 100MHz and beyond, look for it by January 31st.
