Overclocked PII 350 VS Overclocked Celeron 333

I'm debating the following issue in my mind:

I want to experiment overclocking on an Asus P2B 1.10 motherboard. My last foray into overclocking goes back to a Pentium 166MMX overclocked to 225MHz. My current CPU choices are a Celeron 333a and a PII 350 (both slot 1 processors).

Overclockers.com is reporting that the average overclocked speed for the Celeron is 487MHz while the PII is 465MHz.

Can anyone give me insight on why the Celeron appears to be better for this than the PII and which CPU will be most efficient while overclocked?

The Celeron has a higher multiplier than the PII due to it being based at 66Mhz rather than the PII 350's 100Mhz FSB. Celeron 333 uses a multiplier of 5 (5 x 66) whilst the PII 350 uses a multiplier of 3.5 (3.5 x 100). If you divide the average OC speed of the CPU's you will see the difference then. 487 / 5 = 97.4Mhz whilst 465 / 3.5 = 132.89 (133).

The PII would be more efficient due to it's greater FSB & Cache size, than the Celeron unless you could get the Celeron up the same FSB's as the PII, then it may perform about the same as the PII, even though it has a greater clock speed.

I sincerely doubt whether you will achieve 465Mhz on a Pentium II 350Mhz using your P2B mobo. Unlike some other mobos, like the P3B, the P2B does not allow you to set the speed of the PCI bus. The P3B allows one to set the FSB to 133Mhz while retaining 33Mhz on the PCI bus. The PCI bus speed is derived as a division of the FSB speed on the P2B mobo. My experience with the P2B mobo is that unless you have exceptional quality RAM, video card and hard drives any FSB speed over 100Mhz is likely to cause lockups and hard drive corruption, even if you do set the hard drive to mode 0 and play with the CAS memory settings. On the P2B it is quite critical to keep the FSB as close to 100Mhz as possible. Also, if memory serves me correctly, the P2B has a maximum FSB of 112Mhz and can be set to either 66Mhz, 75Mhz, 83Mhz, 100Mhz, 103Mhz or 112Mhz.

From experience I would probably opt for the 350Mhz PII running standard 100Mhz FSB. Pushing the FSB to 103Mhz will only deliver very small gains and I doubt whether this processor / PCI bus will run stable at a FSB of 112Mhz.

The 333Mhz Celeron running at FSB 75Mhz (37.5Mhz PCI bus) to give an o/c speed of 375Mhz or FSB 83Mhz (41.65Mhz PCI bus) to give an o/c speed of 415Mhz is starting to push the speed of the PCI bus beyond it's limits and lockups or hard drive corruption is likely to be the result.

In the unlikely event that you can run the Celeron 333 at FSB 100Mhz (33.3Mhz PCI bus) to give an o/c speed of 500Mhz it going to run quite hot and you will need to address the cooling problems that are likely to occur.

Unless you can run the Celeron 333 at FSB 100Mhz I would stick with the PII 350Mhz running stock 100Mhz FSB.

While these are the results I experienced with my P2B using a Celeron 266, Celeron 300 and a Celeron 300A, your mobo and processors may differ and you may achieve different results.

The cherry for me obviously was the extremely cost-effective Celeron 300A which I ran at FSB 100Mhz to o/c to a very stable 450Mhz.

yea 300A's were a lot of fun to play with.
It was great to tweak those little guys and snag results like you posted Grey, 50% increases :D

nowadays not so much fun...besides the increases are purely academic on the faster processors. IMHO.