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"Budget" Chips go Head-to-Head

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the duking-it-out dept.

StewedSquirrel writes "Anandtech has published an article taking a look at the low-end of the CPU market today. It takes Intel's newest Celeron processors against the AthlonXP and Duron with a Pentium 4 1.8GHz thrown in for comparison. All of these processors will cost you under $120, but the article shows that the old Duron (at barely $40) can out-perform Intel chips costing nearly 3x as much. In addition, it shows that the performance of the Athlon XP is head and shoulders above the Celeron processors, while costing roughly the same."

4 of 372 comments (clear)

  1. Re:They missed the green one! by peterdaly · · Score: 5, Insightful

    On a serious note, people, including myself, are starting to worry about power consumption. I'd like to pick up a low power device for a BSD gateway.

    Agreed! I'm currently interesting in replacing my 400Mhz desktop. (I've got a 1ghz dell laptop, and 12"TiBook) It's used mostly when I either don't want to unpack my notebook, or want to take advantage of my 21" monitor.

    I have three major "wants":
    1. Be good on power...I don't want to power it down. (Does linux suspend well yet?)
    2. I want it to be quiet...I don't want to be able to hear it.
    3. Major brand. I can build and support my own machines, but don't want the hastle with this one.

    It is very hard to shop for something like this, as it's not something that is well marketed. I don't need it bad enough to be willing to spend major time comparing hard to find specs on a model at a time basis. I am sure swordbuy and myself are not the only ones with desires like this.

    AMD was high on my list, and it just jumped a little bit higher.

    -Pete

    --
    Soccer Goal Plans
  2. Upgrades by vasqzr · · Score: 5, Insightful


    These Sub-$100 CPUs serve as decent upgrades for aging systems (e.g. the P3-800 that is barely chugging along)

    I'm using a P3-550MHz, and it's fine for everything I do all day.

    Can I have that 'useless' 800MHz chip when you toss it?

  3. Re:Upgrades not always necesary... by Junks+Jerzey · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Took the damn thing back to their house and a whole bunch of the extended family was there, it being the holidays and all. They check out the computer and they are all, "Nice computer, only 2.6 GHZ though..."

    Heh :) This is the angle that Dell takes. They have those silly charts that shows 2.6GHz is only good for email and web browsing, while 3.0GHz is what you need for serious applications and gaming. In reality, it's only a 15% difference in raw clockspeed! And the actual performance increase is less than that, of course, because the bus and memory speeds are still the same. Okay, and the 3GHz machine uses significantly more power (more than a 15% increase), but Dell doesn't advertise that.

    There really isn't a high-end PC market any more. ALL PCs are high-end.

  4. Re:Video Card by Stregone · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Its probably to move the bottleneck away from the video card.