The Celeron 900 is a Pentium III Coppermine "E" processor with half of the level 2 cache disabled. It is of the second of three generations of Celerons made for socket 370. The first was the 250 nm Mendocinos with 66 MHz FSBs, 128 KB L2, a PPGA package, and no SSE. The Coppermine-128 Celerons are 180 nm chips and have either a 66 MHz or 100 MHz FSB, 128 KB L2, *no* heat spreader, and do have SSE. The last generation of Socket 370 Celerons are the Tualatin-256 ("Tualeron") chips, which are 130 nm, have a heat spreader, a 100 MHz FSB, 256 KB L2 cache, and SSE as well.
This particular chip's specifications:
Clock speed: 900 MHz
FSB clock: 100 MHz
Vcore: 1.750 V
L1 cache: 16 KB L1I, 16 KB L1D
L2 cache: 128 KB at full core speed
Package type: Lidless Socket 370 FC-PGA
Rated thermal dissipation: 26.9 W
I got this processor for use in a MythTV frontend. It originally sat in a computer with a dead motheboard that was being discarded and I removed the processor and put it in a working Socket 370 board. The chip's thermal diode is not correctly calibrated as it says it is idling at 11 C and full load is 23 C on a good heatsink, but I don't think it's more than 10 degrees off. The chip does not put off very much heat as the heatsink feels barely above room temperature to the touch at full CPU load. You could very likely passively-cool the processor if you have good airflow and an aftermarket heatsink. The processor is fast enough to play back 6 Mbps 720x480 MPEG-2 files of standard-definition TV to a CRT TV (no deinterlacing) using MythTV and normal XVideo output without any skips or stutters, but it does use about 80% of the CPU cycles to do so. My verdict is that this is a good chip for usage as a low-power desktop, server, SDTV HTPC, or router/firewall. You can probably find them for free like I did as the chips are usually sitting in motherboards that support 512 MB RAM maximum and thus cannot run Windows XP very well and can't even dream of running Windows Vista but will handle a normal Linux distribution like Debian just fine. even with a full Gnome/KDE/XFCE desktop environment.
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