MAINSTREAM PC USERS love big numbers, especially when those numbers are followed by the letters M, H, and z. As inappropriate a measure of overall system performance as a processor's clock speed may be, it still sells. Just this year I saw a Dell ad hawking 2GHz Pentium 4-based PCs saddled with slow PC100 SDRAM and TNT M64 graphics cards. Talk about a cruel abuse of consumer ignorance!

Intel's previous Celeron offerings have been limited to clock speeds up to 1.4GHz, and that just doesn't give them a very big lead over 1.3GHz Duron processors from AMD. Differences in actual performance aside, Intel lacked a comfortable lead in perceived speed. I guess it was only a matter of time before Intel leveraged its MHz-friendly Pentium 4 architecture to produce a new Celeron with a higher clock speed.

Today we're going to check out the Celeron 1.7GHz and see just what Intel has done to turn its flagship Pentium 4 into a mainstream value processor. We've also rounded up a diverse suite of performance benchmarks and a couple of competitors to show just where the Celeron 1.7GHz sits in the value processor field and why you can never trust clock speeds alone.