Celeron Processors (1 Viewer)

[Keith_R]

Hey all, I may be forced in to buying a new computer soon. Unfortunately I only have the money to buy from a place like Circuit City or Bestbuy and get a entry level machine ($400-$600) with a intel celeron chip. I mainly use my computer for internet, email and occasionally typing a report or two. I'm pretty sure a Celeron (2.2GHZ) can handle this but I'm kind of concerned about the Celeron chip, I currently have an older one in my computer and was hoping to jump to a Pentium 4 if I have to buy a new computer, but as of this weekend I'll only have enough money for an entry level machine. What are the pros and cons of Celerons? will they handle my needs okay? Thanks.

 

[MarkHastings]

Keith, I'm not an expert on this, but I will offer what i think is correct as far as Celerons (and others can correct me if I'm wrong). I believe Celerons are meant for "light" work. They aren't meant to handle the demands of MultiMedia. I know for a fact that you can not add a DVD drive to a Celeron processor. Also, you won't be able to do any 3D games (that well at least) or any type of video or high end graphics work.

As far as MP3's, I'm not really sure if a Celeron will work well, or even digital photos for that matter.

Again, I'm no expert, but what you've mentioned (email, internet, Writing papers, etc.) should be fine, just remember that you won't be able to upgrade easily in the future.

Hopefully someone can ellaborate or confirm my reply.

 

[Jonny K]

Heh. Actually, allow me to correct you both. The Celeron is simply a slightly slower version of the Pentium. Therefore, if you compare a Pentium 4 with a Celeron, the celeron will be a little slower and it will cost a little less.



BUT IT DOES THE SAME THING!!! Only a little slower. You can play MP3s fine, you can play DVDs fine. Games? Sure! It's all good. The main thing with the celeron (if I remember correctly) is that it just has a little less "cache" which is expensive memory added to a CPU to improve performance. That's about the only difference. Thing is, celerons aren't much cheaper than Pentium 4's, so people usually just buy the Pentium. If you want a budget CPU, I highly recommend something from AMD. WAY better value and they perform about the same (in my opinion).



But don't worry about a celeron limiting your computer. Unless you run lots of benchmarks and do serious number crunching, you probably won't even notice a difference.





Jonny K.

 

[MarkHastings]

The Intel® Celeron® processor, now available at speeds up to 2.40 GHz, is designed to meet your basic computing needs, such as e-mailing friends and relatives, tracking home finances, and running educational software for your kids.

 

[Mark Brewer]

My daughter right now has a Celeron 400 with anATI Radeon PCI and watches DVD just fine.

 

[Jonny K]

Yeah, marketing can confuse things too. Same way they'll market a Corvette as a high performance race car, and market a mini van as a family vehicle for driving the kids to soccer. That doesn't mean you can't drive to soccer in a Corvette, or take a mini van on the race track!





Jonny K.

 

[Rob Gillespie]

Celerons are essentially 'cut down' versions of their bigger Pentium brothers. They have smaller cache sizes and don't have the same amount of muscle for the same given mhz rating. I think the bus speeds are lower too. They're perfectly fine for general desktop usage (spreadsheets, word processing, browsing etc etc) but if you want to do anything requiring a lot of uumph (say video processsing or anything with a high CPU intensity) then you're better off with a Pentium. The Celerys (as they're known!) will do the high intensity tasks, just slower.

 

[Ken Chan]

DellSB - Dimension 8300 Tower with 2.6Ghz 800Mhz FSB P4 with 256MB Dual Channel 400Mhz DDR SDRAM, for $599 after Rebate with FREE Shipping!

The devil, of course, is in the details, but you should compare that to what you'd get from Circuit City or Best Buy.

//Ken

 

[Patrick Sun]

I'm still getting by on my 1GHz Celeron-2 that's 2-3 years old on a motherboard of the same vintage. Since I'm not a gamer, the CPU/MB combo works fine for me. If I did want to get into more CPU-intensive processing (like converting video feeds to AVI/MPEG-1/MPEG-2 files), I'll be looking to upgrade MB/CPU/RAM one of these days. I'll be impressed if I can squeeze 4 years of everyday use out of my present PC system.

 

[Steve_Ch]

For $400-$600, you don't need to get Celeron, just check out the "deals" section in the forum (I think it's www.goapex.com). That price get you a pretty decent P4 from Dell.

 

[Keith_R]

Believe it or not I've found a decent P4 in my price range on Dell's website that I think I'm going to buy. It's the Dell 2350 going at 2.2GHZ. Anyone have experience with this model? thanks.

 

[John_Bonner]

If your budget is limited, you should also look at AMD based systems. They often benchmark higher than Pentiums with more processor speed.

 

[John_Berger]

If your budget is limited, you should also look at AMD based systems. They often benchmark higher than Pentiums with more processor speed.

I recently did some price comparisons for my mother-in-law who is looking to upgrade her system in the near future. An AMD Athlon XP 1800+ was about half the cost of an Intel Pentium III 1.2 GHz.

Some won't like to hear this but the truth of the matter is that there is no reason (except for brand-name recognizability and having a warm, fuzzy feeling for owning a "genuine Intel" -- oo-oo-ooh! I'm impressed!) for anyone to have to buy an Intel-based system, especially when upgrading. AMD processors are always less expensive than Intel and benchmark as fast or faster than comparable Intel processors at a slightly faster raw MHz.

Of course, raw MHz really doesn't mean a lot, although to the unenlightened it means everything. Apple, Sun, and RISC-based companies have been trying to tell people that for years. And your actual speed and what you get out of it is dependent on what you do with it. But AMD still almost always comes out to a better value. Intel simply can pump out more of them, allowing volume discounts to PC manufacturers. In combination with the Intel-brand-name-worship factor that many have (since AMD has been unfairly relegated to a "for geeks and tweakers" status), that's the only reason why some Intel PCs are so inexpensive.

But when it comes to upgrading, Intel-based motherboards/processors can't hold a candle to AMD in cost and value.

 

[MarkHastings]

A 2.4 GHz processor for e-mailing friends???

Considering the emails people usually get, I'd say a a 300MHz would probably crash everytime you tried to check your email and got 50 SPAM messages with photos and all that crap.

 

[MikeAlletto]

Keith I just spec'd a Dell Dimension 2350 for 549.

P4 2.2Ghz
256MB DDR SDRAM
no monitor
integrated intel graphics
30GB ultra ata/100 7200 rpm HD
no floppy
xp home
integrate 10/100 ethernet
56k modem
48x cdrom
integrated audio
speakers
wordperfect
4xdvd+rw/+r drive w/cd-rw

As far as intel vs amd. My current pc is an intel processor running off a via chipset. Never going to do anything but intel chipsets from now on. Stability is not what I'd like it to be with chipsets other than intel. But you can't run amd processors on intel chipset motherboards. I'd rather pay more and get stability. I'm looking at building a springdale chipset based pc at the end of the summer.

 

[Keith_R]

Keith I just spec'd a Dell Dimension 2350 for 549.

P4 2.2Ghz
256MB DDR SDRAM
no monitor
integrated intel graphics
30GB ultra ata/100 7200 rpm HD
no floppy
xp home
integrate 10/100 ethernet
56k modem
48x cdrom
integrated audio
speakers
wordperfect
4xdvd+rw/+r drive w/cd-rw

Thanks for the tip Mike but I actually just ordered the exact same PC last night. I got everything there I just added a floppy drive and a nicer keyboard. The price of the computer when I got done was $648 but after shipping and taxes it was $791:frowning: . They killed me with that shipping and tax stuff. Looks like a great machine for my needs, the CD/DVD burner is a big plus , even though I don't know how I'll use it.

 

[John_Berger]

Stability is not what I'd like it to be with chipsets other than intel.

Although with his announcement that he already bought his be this thread will likely be ending, I wanted to say that the notion of superior stability in Intel/Intel as opposed to AMD/VIA is a ridiculous statement. (Sorry, Mike.) Maybe it's true for certain motherboard manufacturers (there are some MB brands that I wouldn't touch with a 10' CAT5 cable ), but you can't condemn all AMD/VIA motherboards.

Out of all of my home PCs, only one is Intel-based. All of the others (including my Athlon XP 2400+ and both of my Athlon 1.4 GHz) are AMD Athlon running on VIA and I have had absolutely zero stability issues. Consider also that two of these are for hard-core gaming and the other is for video capturing, encoding, and DVD authoring -- none of which are lightweight uses. I also have two other Athlon systems, one at work and one that was replaced by the second 1.4 GHz system, and neither of those gave me any hardware stability issues.

I have been putting together AMD/VIA systems for friends and relatives for years. None of them have ever told me about instability problems, beyond those that are inherent with Windows. For myself, I've been buying nothing but AMD/VIA for years and have never had a stability problem that was not the fault of a bad motherboard (which was then replaced under warranty ).

 

[Rob Gillespie]

The problems I've experienced with AMD-based systems have all being down to memory. Pickiest buggers around.

 

[MikeAlletto]

I have an Asus P3V4X mb now. Supposed to support 4X agp, nope not with nvidia cards (don't know about ati). nvidia says its via's fault. via says its nvidia's fault. I initially had odd problems with playing certain games on it. Most would work, others would fail to load (diablo 2 is one that stands out). The cdrom drive I had didn't work with diablo 2 but a slower one did. Ended up being a problem with the via chipset and the ide drivers. 4 in 1 upgrade fixed that one. USB support is kinda flacky. Doesn't always work and sometime locks up the PC so I just don't use usb devices (win 2k so the os support is there).

All the readmes for games all say "via chipset, make sure you have latest chipset drivers". Solution to all the problems is "upgrade your chipset drivers". Over and over again. Well that should not be the problem if the drivers were written correctly to start with. Maybe they've gotten better since I bought my mb, but I don't want to waste my time to find out.

Yeah its only little problems (agp will never be fixed). But it didn't give me warm fuzzies to want to try a via based mb again. I'll stick with something that I know for a fact works and am willing to may more for it.

It could just be me. For some reason, even though I know what I'm doing, computers just don't get along with me. I tend to use them until they scream to surrender.

 

[John_Berger]

For some reason, even though I know what I'm doing, computers just don't get along with me.

Hello, my name is Murphy. Allow me to introduce you to a number of my Laws.