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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!
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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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!
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.
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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.
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?
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
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.
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
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.
Agreed, I'm hanging onto my SMP Pentium III 800 system for just that reason-- Pentium 4's are SMP'able, and I'm not a big fan of AMD processors (for various reasons, none of which I'll elaborate on because I'll just end up being modded a troll or flamebait, like every other person with a dissenting anti-AMD opinion). Besides, this dual processor P3 800 system doesn't even feel like it's aged much; every P4 based system I play with is just as responsive as this box at everyday tasks, and for gaming this system runs fine except for maybe a 30% drop in frame rates (which, as far as I'm concerned, anything over 50-70 fps is great for me).
And as more games become multi-threaded (since hyperthreading is going to be Intel's next big thing), or at least, SMP aware, I should hopefully see a bump in processing speed if their engines are designed right.
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