Quick overclock: Intel Celeron D 326 hits 4560 MHz (90 nm, Prescott, 2533 MHz)

The Intel Celeron D 326 chip is one of the lower-end processors in Intel's LGA 775 lineup. This makes it particularly attractive for overclocking: even if one dies a heroic death, plenty more can take its place.

The CPU

⤢ ВІДКРИТИ

Our test sample is marked SL8H5 and was manufactured in China. The Celeron D 326 has a base clock speed of 2530 MHz, 256 KB of L2 cache, and an 84-watt TDP.

⤢ ВІДКРИТИ

CPU-Z confirms these specs, adding a nominal voltage of 1.344 volts and a more precise operating frequency reading of 2526 MHz.

Test bench

• Motherboard — Biostar P35D2A7

• Processor — Celeron D 326 (90nm/Prescott/G1/2533MHz)

• Cooling — Cooler Master Hyper TX3

• RAM — 1GB DDR2 PQI PC6400 (5-5-5-24)

• Graphics card — Radeon X600

• Hard drive — Samsung HD161HJ 160GB

• PSU — Cooler Master 460W

Overclocking

We managed to overclock the Celeron D 326 processor to a stable 4005 MHz:

⤢ ВІДКРИТИ

Achieving this required boosting the core voltage to 1.536 volts, increasing the FSB to 210 MHz, raising the FSB voltage to 1.32 volts, and dropping the RAM multiplier by one notch.

Given the modest 1GB of RAM in the system, stability testing was conducted using Windows XP:

⤢ ВІДКРИТИ

We also decided to perform a 'screenshot overclock' for the HWBot overclocking database.

The chip voltage was set to around 1.700 volts, the FSB to 240 MHz, and the bus voltage to 1.350 volts, ultimately yielding a 4560 MHz clock speed:

⤢ ВІДКРИТИ

**Be warned: pushing the core voltage above 1.600 volts can lead to permanent CPU damage.**