Celleron? What's that then?

[mrshovelhands]

HI all,
I am thinking about buying a new machine for my father, to replace the old thing that I gave him a while back (my old machine).
I saw an offer on in Dixons (only for this weekend) for a machine which is one of the cheapest I've seen around here (South Wales).
1.7 Ghz Processor
128 RAM
17 inch monitor (15.5 inch viewable area)
64 meg Graphics card
56K Modem
and some other things like the obligatory rubbish speakers that come with cheaper systems.
The whole system is £499, which doesn't seem too bad, but the thing that is putting me off is that I don't know anything about the processor, as it is a "Celleron", and I don't know anyone that's got/used one.
Any opinions on this make would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers

Graham (mrshovelhands)

[Budfred]

A Celeron chip is a Pentium chip that has been given a somewhat reduced level of function. A 1.7Ghz Celeron would be a decent speed and would not obviously be inferior to a Pentium, but would be slower than a 1.7Ghz Pentium. It is analogous to the Duron chip being a reduced version of the Athlon.

You can learn more than you probably want to know about it by checking out Intel's website.

Budfred

[sleddog]

In realworld, everyday computer use I doubt if anyone could detect the difference between a Celeron 1.7 and a Pentium of similar speed. With a fast processor in a system, other system components become the performance bottlenecks.

In the particular system above, the amount of RAM (128mb) could certainly be an issue. For a modern system I'd get no less than 256mb. I'd rather work on a Celeron 1.7 with lots of RAM than an high-end P4 with only 128mb :)

[mrshovelhands]

Thanks very much folks. Much appreciated. I will check up on their site about it, and if I do get one for him, I will get and extra 128 ram to put in it first.

Cheers

Graham (mrshovelhands)

[saphalline]

There are three main differences between the Celeron mPGA 478 and the Pentium4 mPGA 478.

1) The P4 has 512KB of L2 cache, the Celeron has 128KB of L2 cache.

2) The P4 has fsb speeds of 400MHz and 533MHz, with 533MHz now being more common. The Celeron is so far limited to the 400MHz fsb speed.

3) Because of its cheaper nature and lower fsb, the Celeron also comes in much lower frequencies. Top Celeron is, I believe, 2GHz. Top P4 is 3.06GHz.

There's your technical aspects. Basically what they mean is that the Celeron is a poor choice for those who do lots of content creation and/or gaming. As long as your father doesn't create his own DVD movies and isn't salivating to get his hands on DoomIII :p a Celeron is perfectly OK. But yes, I agree that the 128MB of RAM is a bit too slim for any PC running Windows XP. That's the minimum RAM required (or recommended, can't remember) by Microsoft, so doubling it would make it run a whole lot faster!