AMD2600, Celeron 2.66 or P4 2.9?

[OM]

I want to buy a new PC.
I've almost given up trying to fix my last one.

Can someone recommend which I should go for:

AMD2600 (£210), Celeron 2.66 (£250) or P4 2.9 (£345)?

Each of the above costs slightly more than its previous in the list,
starting with the AMD.

How much faster is each model over the other?

Given the prices, which is the best value for money?
(All are standard and basic models with 256MB RAM and 40GB hard disks.)

Thanks.


OM

 

[GFree]

I want to buy a new PC.
I've almost given up trying to fix my last one.

Can someone recommend which I should go for:

AMD2600 (£210), Celeron 2.66 (£250) or P4 2.9 (£345)?

Each of the above costs slightly more than its previous in the list,
starting with the AMD.

How much faster is each model over the other?

Given the prices, which is the best value for money?
(All are standard and basic models with 256MB RAM and 40GB hard disks.)

Thanks.


OM

Depends on your needs. Personally I'd go with the AMD (Athlon) 2600, but
I guess the P4 2.9 MHz would be OK except for the fact it's more
expensive for (IMHO) not much gain.

Stay away from the Celery at all costs.

 

[OM]

I'll certanly take your advice in that case...
But... what's up with Celery?
It can't be THAT bad!? : )
Let me know.
Thanks.

 

[theyak]

I'll certanly take your advice in that case...
But... what's up with Celery?
It can't be THAT bad!? : )
Let me know.
Thanks.

Yes, it's that bad.

 

[GFree]

Yes, it's that bad.

Celery can be a useful ingredient in cooking, but this kind of celery's
only good as a keyring.

 

[Mike Walsh]

I was recently given a Celeron PC. It is pretty much crippled by its small level 2 cache and on motherboard video chipset. This 433 Mhz Celeron performs about as well as my old 266 Mhz Pentium 2.

 

[Chris Stolworthy]

I was recently given a Celeron PC. It is pretty much crippled by its small
level 2 cache and on motherboard video chipset. This 433 Mhz Celeron
performs about as well as my old 266 Mhz Pentium 2.

Lol yeah I tend to agree, pretty much if I hear it has a celeron processor,
I tell them it actually probably runs at about 1/2 the reported Mhz.. Thats
been my experience anyway

 

[OM]

thanks for all the replies.
i've made my mind up and will go for the amd with boosted memory,
graphics card and other things. : )

 

[Steve]

I was recently given a Celeron PC. It is pretty much crippled by its small level 2 cache and on motherboard video chipset. This 433 Mhz Celeron performs
about as well as my old 266 Mhz Pentium 2.

What type of tests did you run to get that comparison?

http://arstechnica.com/cpu/3q99/smp/smp-1.html

I have heard the newer Celerons may be more crippled than the oplder
ones. Don't know for sure though.

Steve

 

[kony]

I was recently given a Celeron PC. It is pretty much crippled by its small level 2 cache and on motherboard video chipset. This 433 Mhz Celeron performs about as well as my old 266 Mhz Pentium 2.

Untrue.
433MHz Celeron was as fast as a 400MHz P2 at most tasks
because of it's on-die cache. Fast on-die cache beats
larger cache on a backside bus at most tasks, save something
like Seti that just runs same code continuously.

The crippling effect was most likely due to the onboard
video, especially if it used shared system memory
architecture, which on a Celery 433 would be 66MHz SDR
memory.