Intel's New Goodies

News watchers had a pile of Intel news to ponder today. On Wednesday, Intel released new Pentium II processors with speeds at 350MHz and 400MHz, a new cacheless chip named Celeron, and a new motherboard chipset called the BX.

Here's a short primer on what these Intel products mean for gamers:

Pentium II 350 and 400MHzGetting the most out of your PC in many ways has to do with the speed of the brain inside. Even if you're new to the world of computing, comparing a Pentium 166 with a Pentium II 400 is pretty simple: the 400 is faster. In chips, like cars, speed is something you're going to have to pay more for. Chip prices are running about US$640 for a 350MHz and $840 for a 400MHz. On top of that, you're going to need a new motherboard to truly get the speed you want out of the new chip. That's where the 440BX chipset comes in.

440BXWhy do you need a new motherboard if you already have a Pentium II-based system? The last chipset on the motherboard of your PC (if you have a Pentium II), called the 440LX chipset, only supports 233-333MHz Pentium IIs. The chipset also breaks an old standard of system bus speed.

These chipsets control the motherboard and how it talks to the hardware in your computer. Think of your motherboard as your spinal cord. The old bus speed for the LX chipset was 66MHz while the new speed for the BX is 100MHz. While it doesn't sound like such a big jump (only a 50 percent increase in speed), why does it make a difference? It increases the pathways of data to system memory. That's going to help out with games requiring healthy doses of RAM since this will speed up the available pathways to the RAM. The more pathways available to the chipset and system, the better your game is going to run.

New motherboards from companies like Abit, Asus, Supermicro, and Tyan will cost you about $200. Also, you need to get new high-speed 100MHz RAM to run with the BX and prices for 64MB will cost from $180 all the way up to about $500.

CeleronThis is Intel's introduction of a low-cost Pentium II for people who aren't all that concerned with the latest and greatest hardware. It is also a fairly direct response to the non-Intel processors that have begun to make a dent in Intel's chip market.

This chip is considered by most as a less-than-perfect solution for gamers. Since this is the low-cost version of the Pentium II, Intel needed to cut corners, and it chopped the cache to make it more available to consumers looking just to get a PC.

Cache for a processor may be a familiar term for many who have Pentium systems (called an external L2 cache). Caches are basically fast RAM specially made for a processor. Pentium IIs have an L2 cache built into the chip itself (which makes it faster since it doesn't need to talk to the motherboard like an external L2 would). Celeron's don't so there is the potential for less performance there for your games to tap into. Intel's own Media Benchmark (a test to compare and contrast media performance on Intel's processors) places a Celeron 266 MHz at 305.36. To put that in perspective, a Pentium 233 MHz MMX with an L2 cache ranked in with 290.10, a Pentium II 233 MHz ranks in at 364.13 and a Pentium II 266 MHz ranks in at 412.31. Finally, a new Pentium II 400 MHz tops the list with a whopping 601.10. See how MHz numbers can be a little deceptive?

Celeron chips are either available in new PCs or you can buy one for about $180-200 apiece. Pentium II 266 MHz chips are selling for about $260.

So if you have some extra money to spend for a fast new system - or if Uncle Sam is giving you money back this year - you're now armed with a little more information in making sure you know what Intel's latest announcements mean for gamers.