The Real Dope on Celerons?

[dragon wench]

I have read a lot of negative views on Celerons as opposed to Athlons and Pentiums. However, most of those opinions I have do not actually state why Celerons are inferior.

So my question is, are they really *that* bad?

I ask because back in September we bought our son WoW. It quickly became apparent that we needed to upgrade his RAM and graphics card. To cut a long story short, it transpired that despite his machine being a P4, it could not actually handle the Sapphire Radeon 9600 XT card we put in, I think it was a voltage issue or something. The comp was originally my father's... and he knows zip about computers. Since it was a P4, and had the capacity to upgrade to 2 G of RAM, we did not realise until after the fact that we would have a problem.

Anyway, Recently we were able to get our hands on a 2.4 Ghz Celeron for our son. The graphics card we had bought, along with the 1 G stick of RAM (It had 512 mb RAM and is now easily running 1.5 G) installed without a hitch.
It plays WoW and Rome:Total War beautifully.

So... what is the story on Celeron? Is it just a brand name thing? Or is there any truth to the stories about Athlon and Pentium being better. I would like to get a new machine sometime soon, and the lower price of Celeron is quite attractive.

[Malta Soron]

IIRC the cache was half als large, limiting the speed.

[Hill-Shatar]

Well, this is useful to read about video cards, but I have not come across anything about that...

Ah, perfect, I knew I had read something on this before! It has the ratings for Cyrix, Celeron, Pentium and Athlon CPUs compared. Now, I don't understand some of it...

[DaveO]

It depends on which Celeron you are asking about. The earlier generations were probably more disadvantageous versus the regular processors. Today, the processors are a good alternative for people in the upgrade market. The Celeron could very well be the 'sleeper' processor due to Intel's problems with heat dissipation for the Prescott Pentium 4 processors. Oddly, neither Anandtech or Tom's Hardware have any recent articles about the Celeron. There's been so much focus on dual core. Useless in today's market, since applications and especially games have yet to use multiple threads that would make use of the capabilities of the processor. The only information I've found about the new Celerons is that the cache is 1/4 of the P4 models. I did find out on Pricewatch that Celerons are now up to 3.0 Ghz on speed. Considering that the current price is 1/2 of the Pentium models, this is attractive for budget system building. The Celeron and Celeron D models are quite similar in price.

The one thing that no review site will give is information on the reliability of components. I'm not talking about short-time reliability, but longer term for at least 12-24 months. I got my Pentium 4 system setup finished somewhere between 12-18 months ago. The system has been very reliable, and other components have already failed(both cooling devices) without the P4 system needing replacement. The CPU fan I was using decided to stop working. Would Athlon CPUs have been forgiving enough to let me find out, or would I have been out of luck? As good as Athlons are for gaming, I don't think it's worth the risk of CPU thermal death and both the P4 and Celeron have slow downs built into the CPUs if they get too hot. I got tired of having to replace Athlon related equipment too often for my tastes. Most of the time the board would go bad, but I've had some Athlon processor failures. Considering the battle of the budget processors, I believe Intel has the advantage due to stability, quality, features, and some more tolerance for component failures.

P.S. - Since you mention that you got this Celeron setup only two months ago, I'm thinking you have either the newer socket models or one for the older socket 478 system boards.

[Malta Soron]

From the second page:

The Celeron has gone through many stages from the PII to to the latest P4. The Celeron was always based on the power CPU with the cache cut down and the system bus knocked down as well (except in the case of the P4 Celeron where the system bus was kept at 400Mhz). This was either due to a fault meaning it could not be sold as the higher CPU or by design.

Looking at the L2 cache on some of the chips we see that the Athlon, P4 and PII all have 256K or more of L2 cache. These are the power chips. If we look at the budget chips we see that the Celeron has 128K and the Cyrix III and the Duron both only have 64K. The reason the Celeron has more is the fact that its really a PIII with half the cache disabled because of a fault.

In the table on that site you can compare the Celeron to other CPU's on FSB, Cache and transistors.

[dragon wench]

Originally Posted by DaveO

P.S. - Since you mention that you got this Celeron setup only two months ago, I'm thinking you have either the newer socket models or one for the older socket 478 system boards.

We actually just set up this Celeron a few days ago. The computer was certainly purchased less than six months ago, however.

Okay, probably a really stupid question.. but I'm not very tech-oriented..
How does a smaller cache impact the way a machine runs, particularly with regard to gaming? Is the speed badly enough compromised to make it a poor choice?

[Malta Soron]

IIRC the cache is the memory in which the CPU stores its commands during the calculating, which means the cache is a possible bottleneck of the CPU. With gaming a lot of calculations have to be made, so few cache could really slow down the computer.
I don't have first-hand experience, but I'd say the upgrade is well worth the money.

[Rookierookie]

To cut a long story short, it transpired that despite his machine being a P4, it could not actually handle the Sapphire Radeon 9600 XT card we put in, I think it was a voltage issue or something. The comp was originally my father's... and he knows zip about computers. Since it was a P4, and had the capacity to upgrade to 2 G of RAM, we did not realise until after the fact that we would have a problem.

While not knowing exactly what the situation was, I would say that the problem was probably NOT with the processor.

So... what is the story on Celeron? Is it just a brand name thing

To put it simply, a Sempron that costs the same as a certain Celeron model would beat the Celeron across the board except in video editing. The performance difference between Semprons and Celerons is so great that it could actually make up for a weaker graphics card (say, X700 Pro vs 6600GT).

since applications and especially games have yet to use multiple threads that would make use of the capabilities of the processor.

False. Quake 4, Serious Sam 2, and several other games are already multi-threaded. New Nvidia drivers are optimized for dual-core CPUs which gives around 10% increase in performance. Windows XP itself allows multiple threads.

As good as Athlons are for gaming, I don't think it's worth the risk of CPU thermal death and both the P4 and Celeron have slow downs built into the CPUs if they get too hot. I got tired of having to replace Athlon related equipment too often for my tastes. Most of the time the board would go bad, but I've had some Athlon processor failures. Considering the battle of the budget processors, I believe Intel has the advantage due to stability, quality, features, and some more tolerance for component failures.

The new Athlon 64s are HALF as hot as the P4 and Pentium-Ds, and the Semprons are HALF as hot as Celerons. You heard me, HALF. At full load, even the highest-end Athlon 64 would rarely exceed 50C, which is the IDLE temperature of a P4. At full load with stock cooling, P4s have been known to reach as high as 80C. AMD K8 processors also consume about half the power their equivalent Intel processors consume.

While Intel CPUs do have safeguards against overheating, these are of limited use to the system as a whole. The CPU itself can withstand 80C, but can all the motherboard components function normally with a furnace next to them?

Simply, if you are attracted to the Celeron's price, look at the Sempron instead. At the same price, the Sempron would be cooler and faster.

http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/2004...charts-13.html

There aren't too many benchmarks for Celerons vs Semprons, but simply from this one (read also the later pages) you can see that the Sempron simply wipes the floor with the Celeron.

[Xandax]

Originally Posted by dragon wench

Okay, probably a really stupid question.. but I'm not very tech-oriented..
How does a smaller cache impact the way a machine runs, particularly with regard to gaming? Is the speed badly enough compromised to make it a poor choice?

Withouth being to techincal then Cache is "simply" a form of memory.
But as opposed to ordinary RAM this is integrated as circuts directly into the CPU, thus it is extreemly fast (compared to ordinary RAM and harddrives which are considered slow).

There are various names of this cache, the Level 1 and Level 2 labled you'll see on CPUs, and generally and non-techincal speaking. Level 1 is the fastest and the one the CPU will look in first - then level 2. If the CPU then doesn't find the information it looks for it will use the RAM and Swap drives for storage, which as said - are slower forms of storage then the cache.
Thus with a higher amount of cache, the CPU can store more information in the cache before it has to utilize RAM and/or harddisk swap drives, making it much faster to do calculations.

Thus for better performance - high cache is always preferable. A good amount of L1 and L2 cache can help the speed with which the CPU does its calculations.

I do not however know how big (procentuel on equal CPU "speed") a difference it would make in for instance gaming, but it does have an impact.