Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
For the same price here you can get an XP 2200+
(Both retail with cooler)
Celeron 2Ghz $149.95 CDN
Athlon XP 2100+ $146.95 CDN
The Athlon will kill the Celeron too!
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.
Check out my life
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?
I was actually very amused also to see that the Celery 2.2 really didn't give much of an edge over the PIII. Consider this: this is supposed to be a generational leap. Yes, I know about the MHz myth, I have a G3 Blue-and-white at home. You would expect to see a MASSIVE difference, though, between a PIII/700 and a chip that is supposedly 3X as fast. And you don't.
This should silence all the people who think that Pentium 4 must be an improvement over PIII. Pentium-M aka Centrino aka Banias is living proof that the PIII architecture can indeed scale to faster speeds with a little help. And that the P4 architecture, frankly, blows goats.
I would like to see a comparison between the two machines they put head to head, plus an Athlon XP Thoroughbred. I know that when I compare speed between my 733MHz PIII and my 1.4GHz/PR1800+ Athlon systems, there is a DRAMATIC difference in speed. Like the kind of spread that you would expect between the PIII and the Celery if only MHz matters.
Maybe it's the faster RAM. (DDR vs. PC133 Cas=2) But kernel builds are more than twice as fast between the two machines. UT performance is night-and-day between the two, but I blame the aging Rage128 video card and the shitty Linux DRI driver for it for the vast gulf in performance. The Athlon system has a GeForce 4Ti4200 and the nvidia binary driver.
Getting back to the issue at hand, there would certainly have to be a board swap in upgrading a PIII to a P4 Celery. You can get a crappy not-so-Elitegroup mobo for that $54 price, and pray it doesn't blow its caps immediately upon stressing it. Or you can spend a little more than twice the money and get a true Intel board that's built like a tank. You would also have to swap out power supplies, too. The case is not the problem. It is the power supply.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
What reliability? I mean, what do you base this on, exactly? Got a link? An impartial study conducted over a period of years (who keeps a desktop CPU that long anyway?). Really, I'd like to know.
Or is this like "Bad ATI drivers," just one of those convenient myths people spout anytime a certain trademark or company name is mentioned? Kind of like "Linux is hard to install and configure." In 1996 maybe.
I was an nVidia fan for years, but when 9700 Pro came out I gave one a try. Am I an ATI fan now? Sure. But if NV40 blows away whatever ATI offers at the time, so be it. Times change. Products change.
Myths, apparently, never die.
I have a Duron running right now that has seen very little down time for over 3 years. It just keeps chugging away, overclocked and over-volted all to hell. It's outlived CPU fans, hard drives, video cards, a stick of RAM, even a motherboard.
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
Myths, apparently, never die.
Naturally. Half the people here still believe the pinnacle of Windows' stability is Windows 98.
"Seriously - celeron = waste of time and money"
So... what does humorously + athlon equal?