So what do you guys think is best? A celeron 2.2ghz with pc133 or A pentium 4a 2.2ghz with pc133? I mean at full load too because the bandwidth not always maxed out.... ie a p4 doesnt always need 3.2gbs of bandwidth.
Exactly. While the Celeron had it's heyday early on, now it's been far to castrated to be a good value. Sure, it's cheap, but it doesn't really even compare to a similarly clocked P4. Part of it is that it's based off the original P4 core, Wilamette, but like harrack32 pointed out, the small cache is the major killer here. PC133 won't do you any favors, but you'll only kill yourself more with a Celeron anymore.
Overclock, or not overlcocking? As my friedns have said, The original pentium cores are now in the Cellerons, the Cellerons offfer nothign compared to its new aged pentium nortwood core processors. Now think about it thisway, The cellors have always been amazing voerlcockers. I've seen friends take 900MHZ Cellerons and reach 1.987GHz with it. Thats INSANE. They are GHREAT for overclocking. Nothing beats them, right now. But if your not an overclcker, or are just a big fanatic of large cahce, you need a Pentium 4. But, the question is, what are you going to be doign with this. I'd say instead of going for a Pentium go for the Celleron, and upgrade to 1024MB DDR Ram. It'll blow away any pentium with 256MB PC133. PC133 dosent cut it anymore, but Cellerons do make the cut. The extra cash you'd save will easy buy you 2 sticks of Geil PC2700 DDR. Thats my suggestions. Take them or leave them
True, but that's the old Socket 370 Celeron's. The new ones (1.7GHz and up) are a P4 variant, and even with overclocking, they still aren't that great. But the old ones overclocking or not, I won't disagree with you there.
I suppose what my query really is whether the bottlenecking of a P4 w sd ram decreases the performance to the point where its working the same as a good celeron. P4a is now getting very cheap, nearly as cheap as a high end celeron. I have myself got a P4a with sd simply cos I just bought a mobo and a cpu for the upgrade. It cost me £300 and I dont regret the buy! I dont need brute speed, so for £300 Ive gone from a celeron 633 to a P4 2ghz @ 2,4ghz. cheers for the replies. lol In contrast im building another comp for another mate. Iver hit a new choice since the last one I built. For a computer for someone who doesnt know what a hdd is, would you have a springdale or Canterwood? The guy wants to play it like its a console so it gotta be stable and doesnt need all the extras. He is having the HT Pentiumc 2.4ghz, and probably an FX because of reliability and good drivers. Performance..... Im sorry but if a GF4 mx420 can hit 50fps @1024x768 on GTA VC, an FX can get 1024x768 with say 4xAA on the same game without dropping below 25fps..... why do we need anything more?
Canterwood boards run anywhere from $170-200 in most cases and depending on what components are available. Springdale is slower than Canterwood, and a bit easier on the wallet. I haven't really looked at the prices of Springdale boards, but they will be cheaper than Canterwood ones. --edit-- Depending on what features you get, some Springdale boards seem to run nearly as much as their Canterwood equals. However, some Springdale boards can run under $100...and that is extremely good for what you get. Either chipset can be paired with ICH5/R ---the "R" denoting SATA RAID in addition to the normal functions provided by a Southbridge. Pretty sweet deal when some companies will add in an addition PATA or SATA controller chip. The FX I'm not really that impressed with. For the money, a comparable ATi card is a better buy. In the past, ATi's driver have simply sucked. However, they started to get their act together after they put out the Radeon 8500. Currently, no ATi card requires an elaborate and/or loud cooling solution to keep the card from over heating. On the high end the 5800 FX card is faster, in some cases, than the ATi Radeon 9800 Pro, however, the lower end FX line is slower, and sometimes slower than the GeForce 4 Ti4200, which is eclipsed by the Radeon 9500. As I hinted at earlier, ATi's drivers have vastly improved. I used to hate ATi's cards. Why? They'd have an awesome product, but their driver team had extremely poor quality. The 8500 was an excellent product, but ATi still had issues. Once they sorted those out, they were able to tweak it and make it a contender with the GeForce 4 Ti4200. Personally, I can't back that last one up, however, the 8500 is no slouch, I can tell you that much. I have seen some very impressive benchmarks on this however. I think [H]ard|OCP had an article or two on this, but off the top of my head, nothing else comes to mind.
It wouldn't matter if the Celeron was twice as fast as the P4. A Celeron is like a broken tricycle... A P4 is like a MONSTER TRUCK compared to it... Don't waste your time with garbage like the Celeron (c'mon, Celerons & Durons are garbage)
All depends on what the comp is for. But now, for the price, there is no need for the celeron really. Even the cheapest of comps can have a p4 and ddr333. As for that fx thing I was going on about..... the comp got a 9700pro and canterwood for a great price. £1100, literally a full spec comp, with tft monitor n everything. Just a slighty lower spec on the motherboard, but its just bits you will never use.... LAN n crap like that. lol
