The Celery Report: Overclocking the Celeron

I now believe that while we have all been looking at the white label on the back of the CPU to divine the information necessary to determine our potential success, we have been looking in the wrong place! If you look at this graphic of the label, youll see that what we thought was the production week is listed as 34.

OEM CPU label
Ive now come to the conclusion that this is actually the packaging week and that the true production week is found on the front, upper-right of the chip.

Ive also discovered that a specific set of symbols is very critical in determining ahead of time if your odds of hitting 450 will be good or bad! I will try to illustrate what appears on the front right of the CPU and what the goods ones should look like:

(Symbol) NM2 9839

94V-0

or

(Symbol) RU M1

94V-0 9843

The first one the symbol looks sort of like a 4 leaf clover in an eye.

The second one the symbol has the word COMPEQ inside an oval. The "RU" is actually reversed and tilted to the left on the CPU.

Note the numbers "9839" and "9843". The first was from the batch labeled week 45 and the second was from the bad half of the group labeled week 46. I now believe that this is the true production week of the CPU.

Now, heres the stunner. The chips containing the first set of symbols were the ones that all performed and nearly all required no voltage increase. The second set of symbols were the dogs. I decided to pull out the CPUs Id had in the past that hadnt performed and, sure enough, they all had the second symbol, regardless of production week! For additional verification, I borrowed a half-dozen of variety two from my local distributor, and these were weaklings also.

I would also like to note that the deadliest combination seems to be the darker green PCB and the "COMPEQ" chips. To the best of my knowledge this has never been noted anywhere on the web!

So, after this weeks testing, the total is now 77 Celerys. Out of this weeks total of 24, 20 did the 450 dance, but 2 required 2.3v core to do it. This gives us a success rate of 83.3%, which is below the norm.

To-date, of the 77 tested, 68 were successful for 88.31%. Discounting this recent lousy crop, we were well above 90% You can bet Ill be avoiding the "COMPEQ" symbolled chips from now on!

Many rumors have been flying that the more recent slot version 300As have not been as overclockable as previous versions. I dont believe this to be true, unless Intel has switched production to the second symbol Ive outlined above. I have no idea what these two different versions mean, only that we need to stay away from the second one.

It will be interesting to see which CPUs are still in inventory, whether it be the "Cloverleaf" or the "COMPEQ". Stay tuned for future developments.

Russ Stringham, Owner
CompuCheap