All benchmarks were conducted on a fresh Windows 98 install, using a newly formatted hard disk. The test PCs were rebooted between tests, and benchmarks were performed four times, or until an easily reproducible score was achieved.

Before starting the performance benchmarking, I admit to harboring very high hopes for the Celeron 600. After all, once you take away the window dressing it's really just a 128K Coppermine, and we already know how fast a fully loaded 256K Coppermine is. The loss of 128K of cache shouldn't be that big a deal, especially considering that an Celeron 366@550 still gives the Pentium III 550E a run for its money on non-SSE applications and games. The only fly in the ointment is the continued reliance on the 66 MHz front-side bus and the possible performance issues inherent with this decision.

I thought it would be helpful to compare the Celeron 600 against both the Coppermine with its 256K of L2 cache, and the 100 MHz FSB of an overclocked Celeron. To that end, I've included benchmarks of Pentium III Coppermine at speeds from 500 to 750 MHz, along with overclocked Celeron 333/500 and 366/550 processors. As you'll see from these benchmarks, the Celeron 600 is certainly a fast CPU, but the Coppermine core does pay a definite price for both the 128K L2 cache and by continuing to utilize the 66 MHz FSB.