Pentium vs. Celeron

[Al Smith]

Thank you all for your knowledge and expertise. I appreciate it. People

seem very passionate about their chip choices, although I guess I would be
yelling if someone were debating department store makeup vs. drugstore.
Here's a quick question. If you had to choose between these 2 computers,
which one would you pick... A) 2.2gig celeron; 512ram; 2 dimms or B) 2.8gig
pentium; 256ram;
1 dimm??

You would save a lot of money if you went with an AMD Athlon-64
system. Both the Intel-chip motherboards and the Intel CPUs cost
considerably more than the AMD motherboards and processors. Anyone
who has built their own system will tell you this. It makes no
sense to go Intel, from a cost-performance standpoint.

 

[cquirke (MVP Win9x)]

Neither, until I knew what the motherboard chipset was, and how big
the HD was, and some other things like is there an AGP slot, is it
micro-ATX that steals PCI slots, etc.

Assuming the motherboard doesn't suck, I'd go Celeron. If the
motherboard does suck, I'd only consider either as spares donor.

You would save a lot of money if you went with an AMD Athlon-64

Yeah, but I don't like the motherboard chipset choices there.

 

[daescgh]

One of the most noticeable and significant differences between the
Celeron M and Pentium centrino (the Pentium 4 is a battery hog) mobile
CPUs is the amount of L2 cache on board. Since this is S-RAM (static
RAM) it is somewhat expensive. The difference in the price of the chip
mostly reflects the larger L2 capacity in the Pentium. The Pentium will
seem to run faster even when the clock speed is slower since the larger
cache stores frequently read code in greater amounts and therefore
allows the processor run more efficiently. The question is: does one
need such improved efficiency? If you run processor hungry application
math crunchers like auto cad etc. (including sophisticated games) then
the answer is YES! If not, you won't notice any difference at
all....There are other reasons the Pentium price is higher. If you wait
a while it will be cheaper though. The fact is, modern day Celerons are
flame throwers compared to Pentium 2s of just a few years ago.