Hot! Celeron D 320 boxed for $44.90 at Fry's, No rebates.

[pulverizer]

Originally posted by: vegeto456
I'm curious if anyone has been to the manhattan beach location and knows if they're any celerons left. I'd call but I'm sure the incompetent sales associate would tell me they didn't have any left even if they did.

Why don't you get of your butt and go there yourself?

 

[vegeto456]

Originally posted by: pulverizer

Originally posted by: vegeto456
I'm curious if anyone has been to the manhattan beach location and knows if they're any celerons left. I'd call but I'm sure the incompetent sales associate would tell me they didn't have any left even if they did.

Why don't you get of your butt and go there yourself?

OH I WILL. and i did. and they had 66 left. :-D. They didn't have any m952 but had 9 or so m950s. So pxc, if you want one you should check the manhattan beach store.

 

[mdetz]

I bought an OEM chip, and the fvckers sold me a used one. I need to go back and see if they have any retail chips left.

 

[bupkus]

I thought the SL87J model was the E0 stepping. I have 3 of these and 2 of the SL7JV. The SL87J has a later packing date but I guess that doesn't matter. I wonder if I can get any of these to 3.6GHz without an after market HSF.
Also, if the SL87J is a D0, I wonder if it will go to 3.6GHz anywhere as easily as the EO SL7JV.

I googled the subject of Celeron D steppings but found nothing of value.

Side point--
Does anyone have the ECS K7VTA3 (PCB:1.0) motherboard? Did you have the 1.1 BIOS?
If you did, how did you like doing a SAVE and EXIT?
For all those that don't, it wouldn't. It would just freeze. It's sure fun trying to save a bios change to force a floppy drive boot especially when you can't SAVE a change.

 

[pxc]

Originally posted by: vegeto456
OH I WILL. and i did. and they had 66 left. :-D. They didn't have any m952 but had 9 or so m950s. So pxc, if you want one you should check the manhattan beach store.

no way. that one is too far away.

 

[craneo]

Originally posted by: craneo
I45 North in Houston Fry's.

Thanks OP, I scored a boxed 320 (2.4G) for 44.90 and its the SL87J code. I could not find any of the mobos for the <$20 range other than the undesirable M950s. Instead I went with the ECS 646FX-A for <$40. Its the one the bundle with all their combos.

3/16 Update:

Still a couple of 320 left in I45N Houston.

I could not get the Celly D to work in the ECS 646FX-A. Took it to work and swapped out processors back and forth between a working P4 system. CPU appeared to be bad. Returned Tues. New chip does the same thing. Both retail boxes I got looked like they had been opened. Gal told me that they test them first. Whatever.

So started to scratch my head and looked on the ECS web site. Although the ]ESC 646FX-A rated for HT and 800FSB, it is not Prescott compatable.

Further research revealed that ECS 646FX-A2 is Prescott compatable.

I'd make two long trips to Fry's already, so I went to my local shop, which for me is www.directron.com (can't go wrong there), and picked up an Asus P4S800 for about $15 more than the ECS. Same chipset, this time Prescott compatable. Lo and behold, it works straight out of the box.

P.S. Straight out of the box means 3.6G! with a small bump in voltage. Temps running low 40s idle and up into just over 50 under load. Which for P4 Pressys, thats about what it should be. No benchys yet, I'm still putting it together.

P.S.S. I was a Intel guys back in the Celly I 300A o/c to 450 days into the Celly IIs. But switched over to AMD XPs. So now, I've gone back to the "dark side".

 

[bupkus]

I'm posting this reply with my new 3.6GHz Celeron d 320 and it seems ok but...
when I try to run 3DMarks2001 it crashes. I upped the voltage 2% from 1.34 to a dancing range of 1.32-1.36 (ala the BIOS) it still occurrs. I suspect this budget ECS PT800CE-A doesn't offer an AGP/PCI lock and the video card (MadDog champion 4000 which the bios reports as an MX440) can't do the overclock.

If you think it may be the power supply, I'm using a new Antec 350W Smartpower with a +12V rail of 21A. Inside the box is just a 20GB WD hdd, an optical drive (not being used at the time of test) and 2x256 of OCZ PC3500 at Cas 2-4-4-9 according to CPU-Z.

I ran Sandra 2005 and got the following:
@2.4GHz
CPU Arithmetic 6420/2946
CPU MultiMedia 13408/15842
Memory 2816/2844 (single channel)
@3.6GHz
CPU Arithmetic 9669/4409
CPU MultiMedia 20190/23850
Memory 3045/3042 (single channel)

Sandra lists an Athlon 3200+ which is my main pc as:
CPU Arithmetic 9142/3482
CPU MultiMedia 20838/22089

Clearly, without the overclock I would just keep using my AXP which is still a better overall CPU according to other more thorough testers.
I think I'll just return those other Celerons I haven't used. I don't need them anyway.
Of course I'll keep this one cause I had that mobo sitting around anyway.
If it had an AGP/PCI lock and dual channel, it would be the bomb of a value/performance backup/MPEG encoder computer.

 

[craneo]

Bupkus:

You might waht to bump that voltage up closer to 1.4v The o/cers at xbitlabs brought theirs up to 1.475! (see link in one of my above posts).

Also check ECS OT800CE-A BIOS The latest is 1.1e dated Jan 25, 2005.

If you can keep it o/c stable your bench numbers make it look like it beat your Athlon 3200+ system which sounds like a similar system that I have as well. But I'm going ot use these two mobos/systems together and get the best of both worlds.

I'm going to be looking at DVDshrink times and TMPEG encode times as my indication of which of my two machines wil be doing the heavy work for me.

 

[bupkus]

First, thanks craneo for the link. I had already upgraded the bios as a result of the worst bios I'd ever experienced. Whenever I would make a change, even if it was just trying to set the bios to the "safe" settings it would not let me exit the bios after the change. Fortunately, I noticed after a reset that the settings had been saved so I was able to get it to boot off the floppy to do a bios flash.
If you try, just to see my point, to download that bios (an .exe file) and double click it to uncompress the files contained within you'd see something very funny. For me WINRAR opened the file in a window with no English characters save the drop down list for the browse button, which is OS dependent.

Here's the rest of the story on my overclock.

I installed my best OCZ EL PC3500 256MBX2 even though there's no dual channel memory controller on this motherboard. I ran Prime95 and got errors within seconds even when I tested without any overclock! Note that the default memory speed was 200MHz with SPD although the Cas in the bios said 2.5 sometimes and 2.0 others. This was after the bios flash.
I tried to figure if the cause was the PS or the voltage. I upped the voltage in the bios to "+2%" but no change. Again, this time up 4% with the same results. Finally, I remember so many personal reviewers who said that this or that motherboard didn't like this or that brand of memory, so I swapped out the two sticks of OCZ and installed one stick of Corsair XMS 512MB PC2700, started Prime95 @ 2.4GHz and went visiting. 12 hours later, and back home, it's still running so it must be good.

After looking over Prime95's stress test options, I noticed that the 3rd option is the most memory stressing choice. That is the one that failed earlier with the OCZ EL. I'm trying the 1st option that is a short string that resides in the L1 cache. So far it's going well @ 3.6GHz. I'm pleased.

 

[bupkus]

What caused me to run Prime95 was my attempts to get a performance metric using 3DMark2001. It repeatedly crashed 3DMarks in the opening tests. Now with the memory swap it runs all the way through 3DMarks so I'm content with it's stability. However, the performance gain with the overclock is not that stunning. I went from about 5100 to 5560 in 3DMarks2001 with a PNY Champion MX 400 GeForce 2 when going from 2.4 to 3.6GHz.
Regardless, these STABLE results are making me a little more enthusiastic for this cpu again as I will need to build 3 more computers for kids at a childcare center in coming days.