Any suggestions,why speed difference?

spud17

Regulars will know I have a fondness for 'rescuing' PCs from friends/skips etc.

Currently as my main PC I still have the Mercury board, AMD Athlon XP2400 and 1GB DDR RAM and dual boot XP Home and Mint.

It works really well for my needs.

I have now been given a Celeron 2.3Mhz machine with 1.25Gb DDR RAM.

I've reinstalled XP (coa on case) all activated O.K.

Also installed Firefox 3.5.3 with same add-ons and Avira, in line with main PC.

The problem was it appeared slow.

I then used the pi calculator from HERE on both, each has the same number of processes running.

The AMD took 1 min 11 secs.
The Celeron took 1 min 59 secs.

I'm intrigued by the difference, when the processors were current, AMD ( I think) were ahead on performance, but surely the Celeron having 2.3Mhz and 1.25 GB should be faster than the AMD.

Or is there something deeper in the specifications that I don't know about.

It's not THAT important, more my quest for knowledge, despite advancing years.

fwor

You'd really need to post the manufacturer's reference for each CPU, as both AMD and Intel have a bewildering number of variations of each of their CPUs. If I had to guess, I'd go for smaller caches on the Celeron, and a slow FSB.

If you can get the ref number off the chip, both AMD have excellent processor finders on their websites which tell you everything you might need to know about each model/stepping/etc.

IIRC, memtest also gives quite a lot of info on cache size and FSB rate while it's running, so that might give a few clues.

One other thing - if you haven't yet downloaded the latest mobo drivers for the Celeron-based machine, the onboard chipsets may not be operating properly/optimally.

nembot

The older Athlon CPU's are much faster per clock than the earlier Celerons, even though the actual processor speed is lower than the PR rating which in your case is XP2400. The 2400 bit means that the Athlon would be equivalent to a Pentium 4 running at 2.4ghz

The Pentium 4 would be faster than a Celeron at 2.3ghz, due to cache size, fsb etc as mention above by fwor.

It was the AMD PR machine at work, if they called the XP2400 an Athlon 1.83 (can't remember the exact speed) people would buy any Intel cpu that was 2ghz or above, thinking it'd be faster.

You can check what type of Celeron with CPUZ, it's tiny and provides quite a bit of CPU/FSB/MEM/Motherboard info.

spud17

If I had to guess, I'd go for smaller caches on the Celeron, and a slow FSB.

They are both the same fsb,but I've found that the Celeron has a 128Kb L2cache against the Athlon 256Kb, that apparently is significant.

One other thing - if you haven't yet downloaded the latest mobo drivers for the Celeron-based machine, the onboard chipsets may not be operating properly/optimally.

Yup, no disks for either board but I'm pretty certain I've found up to date drivers.

It was the AMD PR machine at work, if they called the XP2400 an Athlon 1.83 (can't remember the exact speed) people would buy any Intel cpu that was 2ghz or above, thinking it'd be faster.

It's actually 2Ghz, but you're correct, it seems that at the time these were cutting edge, the AMDs were running rings around the Intels.

You can even heat a room with an AMD, hence I always run with one side off the case.

If anyone is interested I found THIS chart which indicates that the Athlon xp2400 out-performs the Pentium 4 2.5Ghz.

Thanks for the replies, I'm finding it more interesting than the T.V. and a complete contrast to my day job.