Author: Scott Piercy

Editor: Nigel Woodford 

Throughout the history of the enthusiast market, we've been periodically blessed with CPU's that had the potential to perform phenomenally for their price. Though there have been many examples from both AMD and Intel over the years, probably the two that stick out the most in my mind personally however would be the old Celeron 366, and the 1.6A revision Pentium4. Dirt cheap by themselves stock, yet able to be pushed to outperform much more expensive brethren, this is the sort of bargain performance the enthusiast craves. Not only that, but it was relatively easy to do. I personally had a Celeron 366 system running at 601mhz from the day it was built, until just a few weeks ago when the venerable old Abit BH6 inside the system finally gave up the ghost. The CPU itself is still fine. I used no earth shatteringly high end cooling or fancy memory. Just a good thin fin copper heatsink and good SDRAM that might have added a $20-30 premium to the parts list when I built it.