Intel Celeron or AMD K6

The Celeron offers the best bang-per-buck at the moment. It was supposed to be a super-cheap Pentium II to grab the low-end of the market back from AMD. Punters were supposed to turn their nose up at the 66MHz bus (as opposed to the 100MHz bus on the newer PIIs. However, the Celeron has an on-chip L2 cache that operates at the same speed as the core whereas the PII's cache is only accessed at half that speed, although it is twice the size. The net result of all of this is that a nMHz Celeron goes at just about the same speed as an nMHz PII but costs a lot less. So far so good, but then you can boost the Celeron's speed to 100MHz too, using the jumpers on the motherboard, and guess what - it still works! It's not necessarily easy to make a Celeron run at 100MHz, but it's not too difficult. You can even make them work in SMP boards.

This will change when the Pentium III 'copermine' chips become popular. They have other advantages and it'll be tougher to call. Apart from other enhancements they have a 133MHz external bus, if you can get RAM that's fast enough. I suspect this'll make less difference in practice than having a full-speed cache bus to the core. The PIII also has extra instructions that'll be taken up over time - by the end of 2000 you might wish you had them.

The AMD K6 is still a good choice - performance a bit below that of an equivalent Pentium II/III or Celeron but the price is a lot less, as is the supporting motherboard. Great for running things like Microsoft Office - you'll never notice the difference

Don't waste your time with the highest-clocked Pentium's unless you really have money to burn. Currently the Pentium III 500 offers the best price/performance. This will change monthly, of course, and I won't update this more than once a year. As a general rule start with the cheapest chip and buy one before the price increase is a higher percentage than the performance increase in MHz. I expect the Pentium 500 to be replaced by the 550 as the entry level by early Sprint 2000, and the 550 will be the likely entry-level by Summer, just as 800MHz high-end parts appear on the horizon.

A previous winner of this category was the IBM 6x86 PR200followed by the Pentium II 233MHz in early 1998See also Intel Socket Types

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