why not Celeron

happyhero

Hi, Often heard people saying dont buy Celeron when buying a PC, buy Pentium, can anybody tell me in simple terms what the difference is and what it means to the PC user ie any performance differences.

Surely the price difference between Celeron and Pentium is there for a reason.

Heavy users seem to buy Pentium every time and pay the extra for it, and presumably some heavy users know what they are doing when paying out more to have it.

Any info would br greatly appreciated.

Quasar

Don't know about Pentium III etc. but both my laptops, a Packard Bell and a Toshiba, have Celeron. I use both rather heavily and have always been very happy with them.

The PB is almost 6 years old and a bit slow by today's standards, but it's a wonderful workhorse.

My pennyworth, anyway.

Curry_Queen

I also prefer Celeron to Pentium, and have had it in 4 machines now, but I'm afraid I can't tell yo what the differences are, apart from price of course!

Don't know if this site is of any use to you, first hit I just came across on Google


Edit: and I really need to stop replying to posts when my brain is half-mushed from tiredness and risk making myself look a fool!

Sorry, got muddled up, Celeron is the budget end of Pentium and it's actually the Sempron, or the Athlon XP, that I have running in my current machines. And with that I shall say no more and drag myself off to bed shortly LOL!

Darksun

The Celeron is a budget processor. It's good for basic tasks, but it's not very powerful (there are more factors than clock speed in determining the power of a processor). If you want to play games, or do any heavy duty tasks, a celeron won't be much use. Infact, you can often get cheaper and more powerful processors from AMD, if you're self building, but in a prebuilt machine, if the price is right and you just want a basic machine, then a celeron is probably OK.

rogerramjet

http://computer.howstuffworks.com/question268.htm

Don't just think however that because its a celeron its slower...I still have a celeron 300mhz (P2 slot processor and not the a) which is coupled to an Abit mobo, at the time it would out perform on benchmark full pentium 400mhz processors with same amount of RAM which was coupled to a pcchips board.

£$&*"($£&(

If your looking at at a desktop Celeron the reason for not buying it is that the AMD Semprons are cheaper and better. If your looking at a mobile Celeron there's little bad to say about them.

The problem is that the previous type of Celerons were very poor due largely to the low cache and people still think they are as bad. The much older types were much better.

blinky

Simply saying Celeron's are great or terrible isn't the full story as there is more than one Celeron type.

In general the main differences between the Celeron and the full price Pentium model are the Level 2 cache size and normally the bus speed is lower (not always the case). The impact on this depends on the processor architecture. The Celeron M's have less power saving modes than the Pentium M.

e.g. Orginal - Codename Covington 266-300MHz. Terrible as no Level 2 cache.
Mendincho 300A-466(I think). Great 128Kb of Level 2 cache at full speeds (PII's 512Kb L2 Cache ran at half speed). Very popular with the overclockers - Intel pulled the 300A early because it was seriously affecting PII sales. Similarly the Coppermine Celerons were good and good overclockers.

I don't know what the current Celeron is like. However, the Prescott P4's on which they were based have significant heat issues. The first P4 based Celerons were terrible. In testing even when a Celeron 2GHz was run at 3GHz it got whipped by AMD XP1600+.

For desktop machines the current budget processor of choice is the AMD Sempron socket 754 models (I wouldn't buy Socket A now). Both 32 and 64 versions are available, but not all speeds have the 64 bit version yet.

Rave

blinky wrote:

I don't know what the current Celeron is like. However, the Prescott P4's on which they were based have significant heat issues. The first P4 based Celerons were terrible. In testing even when a Celeron 2GHz was run at 3GHz it got whipped by AMD XP1600+.

Prescott based Celerons obviously have similar heat issues to P4 Prescotts (although less so as they run at slower speeds) but they're a lot better than the original P4 Celerons as the L2 cache has doubled to 256KB.

mjhmjh2

Think of the celeron as the family car and the pentium (or AMD equiv) the sports car.

If you are buying new.....

If you just want to get from A to B and occasionally C (word proc, internet, spread sheets, email, a few basic games etc) then the celeron is perfect at a good price.

If you want to get from A to B as fast as possible and show off along the way (play the latest games, do video format conversion in real time, high end graphics processing etc) then the P4 or AMD quiv is the one to go for - expect to pay more.

If you are buying a PC try to work out what you want it to do. My general advice for buying a 'future proof' pc is to look at the latest highest spec - step down two steps (e.g. if the latest processor was a 4ghz, then drop back 3.8... to 3.6), the price is often much lower for only a small drop in performance.

HTH
Matthew