Masking the named pins was a daunting task. I expected it would take me ten minutes or more to accomplish, but it must have taken me about three minutes!

Now here is where the disclaimer comes in. Pushing more water through a channel increases the wear on the banks, and I am not convinced that a primary working system should be overclocked in the manner I am describing. Running eight or ten hours a day with an overclocked Celeron may well shorten the life of the CPU, and you WILL void your warranty.

However, my system is running very stably, and frames rates are up almost 50% over my PII 300. Because the CeleronA CPU is a relatively small investment in the CPU world, and because this gaming system can be put to sleep with ease, thus saving wear on all parts, CPU included, I've made this attempt.

Note also that if you have the determination, you could probably adapt a CPU cooler to the Celeron. The size of the active cooling unit itself with heat sink is much smaller than the standard fan and heat sink for this CPU, but is apparently considerably more powerful, since it uses a mini refrigeration system.

After I masked the required pins I inserted the CPU back into the slot and booted WIN98. Tada! Success! WIN98 booted immediately and everything ran perfectly.

I checked the BIOS Power Management settings: instead of the 2.0 volt reading previously recorded, the BIOS now reported main CPU voltage at 2.2.

Heheheh! I was on my way. I launched in Falcon 4.0. Running with a 16 meg AGP based Velocity 4400 this should prove interesting (also 96 meg of SDRam). I started out at 1024x768. Frame rate was silky smooth and roughly 50% higher than my PII 300.

I launched Microsoft Combat Flight Sim at the same resolution. WOW! I hit 55 fps and actually saw SIXTY flash on screen at one point from the fixed cockpit view. Unbelievable. I am beginning to believe reports that the CeleronA is actually FASTER than a standard PII in games.

Click to continue . . .

Incidentally, there are reports that TNT based boards don't like the earlier ASUS TX mainboards (like P2L97) and I believe them. I had intermittent lock ups with the MS CFS beta on my other mainboard but have found it rock steady on the P2B.

There you have it. The CPU is certainly running warmer than it was at 2.0 volts, but I can still touch it. (My mainboard stabilizes at 31 C). I also applied high conducting grease to the back of the heat sink, which increases conductivity (and thus the efficiency of the fan/sink unit) greatly. I have also heard that SOME Celeron As require 2.3 volts to run stably at 450MHz. Frankly, I would begin to worry about heat at that voltage.

There are some excellent sites on the Internet that describe overclocking. The Ultimate PC site noted above is a good one, and Tom's Hardware is another.

To download a temperature monitor program that works within Windows click HERE. Note however that you will have to add a thermistor in order to monitor the actual CPU temp with the ASUS mainboard (Radio Shack part no. 271-110A) and plug it into pin JTCPU.

In the shot below Sensor 2 is my CPU. I've found I am running between 48 and 51 C and I have an alarm set (within this software) to go at 56 C.