One major reason Intel wants to phase out the 66MHz bus is because the low frequency has quickly become a major bottleneck for budget systems. Moving the Celeron platform to 100MHz front side bus operation will allow 133MHz-based processors to dominate the high end while the 100MHz CPU's still have enough steam to revolutionize the budget sector. While the Celeron 533 is the last of the 66MHz based CPUs, it still brings price and performance together which is what we want to see.
With 128KB of on-die L2 cache, the Celeron actually performs better in a gaming environment then an equally clocked Pentium II. Games make far more use of the full-speed 128KB as opposed to the half-speed 512KB of the Pentium II and III. For gaming purposes, a Celeron processor may be just what the doctor ordered.
Traditionally, CPU's manufactured at the .25 micron process have reached their manufacturing limit at around 600-630MHz. Well under that limit, the Celeron 533 operates with complete stability at 2.0v. Unfortunately the high clock speed of the Celeron 533 doesn't leave much room for overclocking, but the guarantee of 533MHz is definitely a safer bet then risking money on an overclocked CPU.
Here are the components of the test bed we use for our intensive benchmarking. We'd like to note that no processors were harmed during testing.
GeForce 256 with 32MB DDR memory (120/301MHz)
SB Live! Value
ABIT BE6 and ABIT BP6
128MB PC100 RAM
5.1GB Western Digital UDMA/33
To compare against the Celeron 533, we used:
Pentium III 450MHz
Celeron 300A @450MHz
Celeron 300A