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Intel Celeron 2.2GHz Reviewed
Detonator 3:16 writes "Black-Ash.net has posted a review of Intels Celeron 2.2GHz Budget CPU; interestingly they have compared it to a common older CPU (PIII-700MHz) to see whether it would be worth using this CPU as an upgrade." Celerons have usually a been a decent processor for the money, and this one looks to continue the trend. It's not the fastest chip ever, but for spending less than $100, it's a good bargain.
the review points out that an upgrade requires an atx case with a p4 psu. in this case, wouldn't it make more sense to upgrade to an athlon?
Conclusion:
If you are looking to upgrade an older system, and you don't want to spend a lot of cash, then the Celeron 2.2GHz might just be the right processor for you. From my experience with a P4 1.6A processor, that is the first Northwood P4 with 400FSB and 512KB of L2 cache ,I would say that the Celeron 2.2GHz performs a little slower, maybe 5%.So, you are getting a 1.5GHz +
P4, at a price of 75-85 USD compared to the P4 1.5GHz costing from 99-127 USD. Combine that with an Asus P4B266 motherboard at 50 USD and a stick of DDR266 memory at 22 USD only, you are looking at a total renewal of your old system for as little as 157 USD which seems quite ok for me. Do note though that you will need an ATX case for the motherboard and a P4 power supply, as your older one will probably lack a special connector that P4 motherboards require to power the CPU.
PROS:
Good All Round Performance
Price is very good, around 85 US dollars at most
Performs similarly to a fully fledged P4 2.2GHz in certain apps
CONS:
Not as good as a P4 2.2GHz in gaming
128Kb of L2 Cache
400Mhz FSB
Looks like a great CPU for granny!
Hardy fucking har. Not funny.
typical Fobbman nonsense on /.
Short, straight to the point. Is it me, or is the gap between Celeron and P4s in performance getting larger? Seems this would make AMD a better choice, dollar per dollar, if the big resellers would use them.
My point of comparison was a Dell 2.0ghz Celeron system I purchased at Christmas for my parents. Good thing they don't play Quake III. Now I wish I would have gotten them the AMD system from someone else.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
they have compared it to a common older CPU (PIII-700MHz)
The 2.2Ghz versus the 0.7Ghz. *drums in background*
Oh the excitement!
Note to self: get smarter troll to guard door.
Go to my site and check out the links.
A programmer is a machine for converting coffee into code.
What would be more sensible is not only a comparison to the old PIII, but a comparison with AMD's equivalent (eg. Duron).
In Soviet Russia, beowulf clusters imagine YOU!
When you can pick up an AMD AXP 2400+ for $92, why even goof with some budget celeron CPU? If you are in the mood for an upgrade and don't want to wait for A64 in September, then pick up a pretty nForce2 board like the Asus A7V8X-DX or just the A7V8X. Great board with great features (dual lan, serial ATA) and be happy!
Seriously - celeron = waste of time and money.
The ultimate network admin tool needs HELP!
An Athlon 2200 is $71.04 on Pricewatch right now. Pardon my feigned ignorance, but how exactly are you saving money while still buying an inferior CPU?
-theGreater Sarcasmic.
Here's a mirror of the article.
Karma: Excellent (fuck, even in the future moderation doesn't work!)
The tests used in the review are two Quake III based tests and 3d Mark 2001. Part of the reason for such a small increase (23-48%) with 300% of the processor is not just the difference between PIII and Celeron architectures, but because the 3D Card is a more important consideration then the processor in these types of tests. Some office benchmarks or video encoding speed would have been valuable metrics for comparing processors.
I understand that the review is somewhat game centered, I suspect the review site is as well, but this review does nothing for me.
Any frame rate that exceeds the refresh rate of your display is effectively wasted. You just won't see the extra frames. A 23% improvement just means that many more frames you won't see.
In all honesty, since he had to replace both the CPU and the Motherboard, the improvement provided by the combination will touch a few other things that should be presented. Since he chose to use the same video card, how much of the processing load was offloaded to the card? Is there a way to see comparable information wrt the hard drive?
For a closer to purer CPU comparison, I would like to know what kind of improvement to processing Seti@home blocks, or any of the other distributed computing projects.
-Rusty
You never know...
ok. So option one:
buy a 2.2 ghz celeron for $70 and get a computer that performs like a 1.5ghz p4
Option two:
buy an AMD for $70 and get a 1.8ghz chip that performs like a 2.2ghz p4
I think he should have mentioned this in his article. AMD affors excellent alternatives if price is an issue!
Baah! This is his own home page, the review written by him, of course he finds it interesting!
Pardon my ignorance here but why the 3d tests? It says right in the article that this is not the CPU to get for gaming. Wouldn't it make more sense to compile some software or something of that nature and see the differences? Anyone know of a hardware review site that has useful benchmarks for those of us who don't care about pc gaming? I want to see kernel compile times or something. Something I can relate to.
Check out my life
Not to be elitist or anything, but a Celeron review?
Yea, that doesn't sound elitest at all.
Not everyone needs the newest cpu around. Some just need Office to run really fast. Some don't even need that. The review is a comparison, upgrading an older p3/700. Try RTFA next time.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
wtf?
Why do people insist on comparing a celeron to a P4 or athlon?
These cpus are targeted to different markets. Thats like comparing a P4 to a Xeon.
A 2.2ghz celeron is definately a good thing, and the performance is quite good for the price. These are entry level economical chips. My experience is all celerons work on pentium boards of the same class. So if you burn out a P4, why bother spending more money on a P4 when you could cheaply limp your computer on a celeron till the P5 comes out? Then spend the money you saved and get a P5 board too.
The other thing to note here too is that I know for a lot of people who don't have much money, especially kids on student loans, or perhaps even low income families, without the celeron chips, they couldn't get into modern computing. I aplaud intel and amd for coming out with cheaper chips. So what it doesn't compare to a P4? who cares, the consumer is buying it for the price and performance of THAT chip, not because it is slower than a P4.
I have a 2 GHz Celeron here, overclocked to 2,6 GHz using the retail fan with 7 volts (12v default). Although its not the best numbercruncher out there, its definately worth the money I paid for it plus the heat generation is so low that it allows me to overclock it and still run the retail fan with a lower voltage than default to keep my system very silent. Comparing to my old 566 Mhz Celeron which I ran at 850 Mhz its fast; using a software called PiFast to calculate 4194304 digits of pi took about 85 seconds with the old CPU and now it takes about 39 seconds with this CPU, although the biggest difference in this benchmark propably comes from the increased memory bandwidth, thanks to the DDR memory. I do some gaming with it too, and im happy with it.
celerons are the equivalent of nvidias mx line(and the coming lowend-fx).
in other words: cheap, but horribly expensive when looking at the performance.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
A realistic graphics benchmark would be a program that drew more and more polygons until the frame rate started to drop. That would actually tell you something useful. That's what you care about, after all.
It's amusing how much weight people give to those "refreshes faster than the framerate" benchmarks. NVidia drivers used to spinlock when waiting for vertical sync, instead of blocking. That didn't affect game benchmarks, but that CPU hogging forced OpenGL programs to 100% CPU utilization. I spent some time convincing NVidia's developers that they should block when waiting for vertical sync. The convincing argument was that benchmarkers turned off wait-for-sync, so it wouldn't affect benchmarks. NVidia then fixed it.
Multithreaded game programs speeded up, too.
As for the review, do the grey letters on a black background indicate that it's addressed to an audience that likes "shades of black" games?
unfortunately no. Intel added a new bignose instruction.
5. Profit
hehe
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
While the CPUs are stable, I just can't find a good board that can go more than 6 months without a problem. I've had SiS, nForce, and VIA based boards that have all eventually crapped out.
The comparison is quite fruitless, as others have already pointed out. The main issue is however that the CPU price is now such a small fraction of the total system price, that CPU cost doesn't make much of a difference for the total system cost.
Folks seem to spend more money on their graphics card and even the case than on the CPU... Processing power has become way cheap.
Ha ha! YOU FAIL IT! Stallman doesn't have a home.
I just went to the website of the FIRST LISTED and it was $67.99, as opposed to the $67 pricewatch said, now, unless you were talking about 99cents, then you sir, are a fucking idiot.
Seriously, if the point is an upgrade for cheap and the applications you want to run are similar to those in the review, why not just pop out the old "slow" 700 Mhz P3 and pop in a faster one? A 1.2 Ghz P3 goes for $99 on pricewatch which is going to be far cheaper than any other upgrade (providing your MB will take it of course). It seems that if the 2.2 Ghz Celeron was only about a third faster on the applications tested then a 1.2 Ghz P3 with its near doubling of the old P3's clock speed should be slightly faster than the Celeron, at least for these applications.
Of course I think shelling out a couple hundred bucks for a 1/3 performance boost in Quake is asinine, but then I also just retired my P120 after seven years of regular use.
This had to be one of the very worst reviews I've ever read. The lack of critical thinking is astounding.
First, if you're going to have to replace the motherboard to use a Celeron, you're going to have to replace the memory to avoid regressing in performance. Run that Celeron on the same SDRAM that you had from the P3, if you can even find a motherboard to do that, will result in a substantial performance DOWNGRADE.
But since the author is presenting the idiotic scenario of upgrading by getting a $100 budget processor, along with $200-$300 in new motherboard and new PC133 memory (since PC133 costs more than DDR these days), why not consider other alternatives?
As many others have pointed out, if you're going through the trouble of replacing a motherboard, and therefore, the memory, too, why not just go AMD? Clearly a much better value.
Even better yet - why not just get a faster P3 off of eBay or a clearance outfit, and get a speed boost past the Celeron without the expense and difficulty of pulling the motherboard, reinstalling operating system and/or drivers, etc?
And hey, you'd have enough left over to buy a really hot video card, too.
Bad enough that you have these sites that are trying to be the next Anandtech without the brains. Worse that Slashdot would link to this drek and therefore help support it.
jonathan
First and foremost, I have to say that I'm very much opposed to small copycat hardware sites getting free hits and advertising bucks because their submission slips through the slashdot nets. Note that the submitter is affiliated with the site :-/
Second, the comparison of a p4 with an older cpu is not a new thing, and has in fact been done very poorly here via choice of benchmarks. If you want to see a real old-->new cpu comparison, check out the all encompassing 100MHz-3.06GHz roundup at tomshardware. They've tested 65 cpus in a RANGE of systems, not just one system with an inadequate video card and two widely separated CPUs.
Just because this junior reviewer finally saved up enough allowance to upgrade to a 2.2GHz celeron from a p3 700 doesn't mean we should then finance that switch for him in ad revenue.
I'm really disappointed that a successor to the age of Celeron I's on BP6s has never come forward. Sure, I can SMP expensive AMD or Intel chips, but the whole point of the BP6 experience was the quantity-over-quality aspect. And yeah, I know you can fiddle with Athlon MPs and sometimes get them to run in SMP, but I want something more certain. I want my cheap shit, dammit!
Finally, I have a reason to dust off my dual processor celeron board (no, that is not an oxymoron).
That thing ran circles around my 2 GHZ P4M with just dual 650 celerons!
Woot!
http://bp6.com
Hello,I'm the reviewer.I would like to point out some things about the specific review: 1.If some of you consider me biased,I would like to point out that I am an AMD hardcore fan.Even if I am one though,my reviews are objective,even to the last sentence. 2.Here in Cyprus,AMD systems are very hard to find.Intel dominates the market with an 80% at least percentage.Even if I tried to find one for review,I wouldn't be able to get it for testing only.I would have to buy it,as I have bought the Celeron. 3.Since people generally don't realise that more MHz is not necessarily faster,subsequently the AMD market in Cyprus at least, is very limited. 4.Concerning the critisism about not mentioning an AMD processor:I know that for the same money,even less maybe,you can get a better AMD system.But,I cannot mention in reviews hardware that I don't have.I cannot make assumptions - even if I do know that they are true - that an AMD processor costs less at the given level,while outperforming all competition,without a chip to allow me to run tests.I cannot tell to someone in my own review,that even if I'm giving you these results, reviews I have read show the specific AMD processor to be faster.I just can't do that. 5.Finally,I would like to point out that I am not comparing the Celeron processor to anything,besides an older system of mine.I am reviewing the Celeron on its own,as a budget processor.Does it perform all right for me as an upgrade?Yes it does.Is it cheap?Yes it is.Is it worth it?Yes.Does it cost much?No.So for me,its a good purchase.There are other alternatives out there,but I don't have access to them.It's not a review about the best budget processor.Its a review of a budget processor,which in my opinion offers good performance for its price.AMD systems may offer more,but that doesn't take anything away from the specific processor. To one specific responder: The Asus P4B266 is only an option.Not all P4 motherboards offer EZ Plug,so if someone doesn't want to get an Asus board,he'll need a new power supply. Regards, Antonis Spyrou (Black-Ash.Net Reviewer)
I have recently been testing prototype Celeron 2.2Ghz systems for use in an office environment, using ASUS Terminator P4 Barebones boxes with 512MB RAM and Windows XP / Office XP. I have basically been trying to come up with a simple, cheap desktop machine to run office apps, web browsing and Citrix ICA Client, for a rollout of 100 or so machines for our Company.
As user perception is EVERYTHING, what I have been looking for is simply a machine whose user interface FEELS fast to the user, and not necessarily have outstanding number-crunching abilities. In other words, as long as things "open quickly", the users will be happy. They don't give a shit about 3dMark scores or Seti@home crunch times, because the machine will spend 99% of its life running Word or Internet Explorer. My approach has been to give the 2.2G boxes a very basic WinXP Pro setup, with plenty of RAM and a decent Harddrive. So far, the prototypes I have built have passed with flying colours in this regard. I have tested a few out on real users, and have got very positive feedback so far. So, I would say that the 2.2G Celerons are ideal for this situation, and probably more reliable than the AMDs.
Please people, there is no universal CPU. You need to choose the most appropriate processor for the role. Although this sounds really obvious, it is rarely put into practice, and lots of supposedly smart people get bogged-down in monotonous holy-wars about AMD vs Intel or whatever. AMD and Intel both make great chips - all you need to do is look at it objectively and choose the right one for the job.
Just FYI, i will NOT delete this article, i do not try to hide my mistakes, personal or digital. If you have any comments about it that you want me to read, come and spam my forums :)
Since I'm not in the mood to get in a fight with you guys,I'll be short and to the point: 1.I don't want to be the next Anandtech.They are large,they have money they get samples.I do with what I have. 2.I'm not getting any money for this by the way,since I'm in the Mediterranean,and I'm writing for a site in the UK.I'm helping out a friend,I have a day-job. 3.Whoever said that you have to get SDRam for the Celeron?If you even bothered to read the whole review,I'm pointing readers to DDR ram prices and a DDR based motherboard! 4.Do read TOM's review as well.Unfortunately for me,I don't have 300 spare hours to spend on benchmarking nor the hardware for that many tests.And since you are aiming for a budget system,you'll probably end up with a GeforceMX,so don't call the Ti200 an old card,since its right on the spot as a value card! There you have it.I won't even bother with replying back,so feel free to bash away. Thank you. Antonis Spyrou
is 'sped' up.
Why are you doing this? There is no plausible reason for office drones to need 2.2Ghz systems to crank out MS Office documents and cruise the web with IE. Give them what they need, nothing more. You are trying to make the users happy by giving them fast computers it seems. They do not come to work because they get to play with a fast box, they come to work to work. Easy eh? Give em some 450Mhz Compaq DeskPros with Win2K and they will be fine. Why you are wasting your company's money this way is beyond me.
This is an XP 1700 (1.46GHz), easily but poorly overclocked on a ECS K7S5A (not an O/C-friendly motherboard) to 147 * 11 = 1647 MHz. For reference, BIOS recognizes it as a XP 2000, and I have DDR memory, not SDRAM (this board supports both).
Total computation time : 32.03 seconds
I paid $50 for this CPU several months ago. I don't use the retail fan for my 10% overclock, since I have much higher goals in time. This CPU is extremely cool at stock, I'm sure 10% on a retail sink would be fine.
Here is the method used:
Computation of 4194304 digits of Pi
Method used : Chudnovsky
Size of FFT : 512 K
Physical memory used : ~ 29536 K
Disk memory used : ~ 0.00 Meg
I pressed: 0, 0, 4194304, 512, 1.
The space unintentionally left unblank.
Is it just me or are both those 3dmark scores pretty low?
Perhaps comparison with current tech would give it some context. They say that running at the lowest resolution should remove the video card from being a bottleneck, yet there's something wrong with the scores!
use Mandrake 8
uhh...wha? i was the one that called that d00d a ho, but what the hell are you talkin' about, man? was that comment obtuse, or have i taken too many bt's?
this guy
You really want to be a reviewer? Learn to fucking take criticism then. Be humble. Listen more than you spit out of your piehole.
Oh, and learn to format properly. That post made you look like a clueless idiot.
This review is one of the worst review i have ever seen. i really didnt understand why slashdot has put that anyway (maybe the guy is a friend of slashdot guys or stg?). only two stupid game releated tests for Gods sake. And coclusion "yeah great CPU get it!". Where is the same priced competitors? Where are the other tests? it is giving the impression that as if only the cpu replacement is a good idea but you have to change whole system (main board, CPU + memory), why not getting a 1 GHz PIII then? it is cheaper at least. and of course same performance can be gained with a 30-40$ less AMD processor anyway. Slash dot is very good at choosing the worst revievs. (like Tom's hardware's review for Opteron.)
I own an athlon and went through 2 motherboards. An abit and a chaintek. Both had VIA chipsets which blew. Some of them are good and some or not. My Asus also has a VIA and its fine and stable with my athlon. Also early AMD tunderbird chipsets have had known problems with geforce video cards. No its not just a windows problem. There is even a registry hack to make windows less flakly with them and a patch for Linux to make them more stable. There is an electrical problem as well as memory corruption bug that both NVidia and AMD point fingers at who is responsible.
When you buy from an Intel they are more expensive but have gone through higher reliabilty checks. If I needed a server I would still chose my old pentiumIII with its intel chipset then my current AMD athlonXP with a VIA one. But for desktop use I do not care.
If your buying an AMD system only buy from ASUS, TWAIN, or other known reliable brand and check newsgroups and particular chipsets to avoid. Avoid Abit, chaintek, or Soyo.
Most athlon systems are reliable. You just got to be carefull and an intel solution is more guarunteed reliable.
Ask any OEM about reliabilty and they will always say intel motherboards generally are more reliable.
http://saveie6.com/
I (the original author of this thread) do chose the most appropriate processor for the role.
I code, taking things way beyond the average coder / user ever would in my day to day routine. Therefore, I *need* as much power-per-cycle as I can get. In a word, AMD's ROCK at this, and always will. so AMD is the CPU for me. Intel good, celery good. Just not the one for me.
The celery sucks, IMHO and always will. The cheap pieces of crap still have there uses though, I guess.
If that's what you want.
I use Mandrake 9.0 (when I have work too do but DOS is for games.)
Diplomacy is the art of saying "Nice doggie" until you can find a rock. Will Rogers
I picked up a dell inspiron LAPTOP with an NVIDIA GeForce 4go, 15" lcd, 512 MB DDR, and a 1.6 GHZ celeron on the cheap. I've got RH9 on it and it rocks. This thing plays games much faster than my 1.4 ghz athlon system... I shit you not. I can run q3, rtcw, ut, ut2003,etc,etc,etc all at 1024x768 @ +40 fps (well, quake 3 + rtcw run much faster than that ;). I will admit that it probably has something to do with the GFX card. Maybe an equiv AMD would be a faster choice, but for the price that I got this thing for ($850 usd), I think I got a sweet deal.
:-D
I have owned a couple of Celeron based systems including this one. The advantages include less heat (this laptop runs at sub-arctic temperatures, lol), battery life is in excess of 3 hours, and for the price, the performance is more than what I need. As an added bonus, the thing runs all of my pr0n DVDs without a hickup
Boy, this one took some real thought didn't it?
: I'll post a link to PCMall's product with my advertising link on Slashdot.
: ???
: Profit!
Oh!, wait! PC Mall doesn't even stock the product you were attempting to spam!
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
www.GamezCore.com For Hardcore PS2 Gamerz : By Hardcore PS2 Gamerz
Intel good, celery good.
The celery sucks...
dumbass....
oh, and there's nothing at all 'H' about your 'O' either, you pompous windbag.
Give them what they need, nothing more.
But this is what I am doing. The 2.2Ghz Celerons are cheap and are entry-level. Believe me, these boxes are quite cheap to build. If I were buying secondhand PCs, then I would consider your suggestion of 450Mhz DeskPros. But since I have been asked to buy new PCs, I believe the 2.2's are suitable as they are expected to remain in service for the next 3 years.
Also, these guys need to run a particular web application which *Requires* IE6, which runs like a pig on the older hardware.
They do not come to work because they get to play with a fast box, they come to work to work.
True, but by far the largest number of complaints I get about the PCs in our network fall into the 'MY PC is too SLOW' - category.
Our previous generation of SOE PCs are a mixture of Celeron 433's and PIII 500's. While I think these are still adequate for office use today, these newer 2.2G's are very noticably 'zippier' than our previous generation. I like to keep the users happy - its part of my job.
I haven't had any Abit problems, but I check on the issues with any board at amdmb.com before buying.
But I would agree, for overall reliability, ASUS is the best. I'd take ASUS over Intel.
I had a server with over 200 days uptime with a Duron 700 and FIC AZ11 MB (nasty cheap MB)
Benchmarking Quake3 at 640x480x16 Low Detail is actually a reasonable way of comparing CPUs. The Geforce 3 used here is enough for such a small load.
I managed to get nearly 140fps in such conditions (maybe it's not the same demo used), on my Duron 1300 w/ sdr PC133 and a Geforce2 MX. That's very comparable to what I see there.
(I guess that my system is bandwidth limited, and maybe the GF2MX holds it back a little bit)
based on old performance testing.
Pretty stupid not to buy the lowest low end p4 instead.
As much as I like RMS, I have to admit this made me laugh my ass off.
Run and catch, run and catch, the lamb is caught in the blackberry patch.
klfajvjklafjkl
Tom's Hardware has tested a bunch of processors from 100 MHz to 3 GHz (and it's not just game benchmarks). Almost makes other processor articles redundant.
still runs a cacheless Celeron 300 overclocked to 450 Mhz.
You mean this isn't a poll?