Pentium vs. Celeron

[Juan Carlos Rey]

Celeron is a economical Pentium with no cache at all. Then cames Celeron "A" with cache but external to the processor, that´s why Pentium II is faster, with its cache inside the chip. Pentium III is a newer processor, superior to both Pentium II and Celeron.

[HarryW]

Celerons will perform very similarly in terms of performance when compared with the standard Pentiums, if you are looking at integer calcumlations. They are excellent considering price and performance together in this respect. They fall short, however, when you look at their floating point performance, which is lacking.

The earlier celerons were very good for overclocking too (most notably some Celeron 300As, which could be overclocked to 450 MHz). I'm not sure how viable an option overclocking is with the newer pentiums.

The AMD Athlons are generally recognised as being slightly better than the Pentium IIIs, and are also a bit cheaper. If you get an Athlon get one of the new Socket A chips, they have faster level 2 cache - 256k of full speed cache I think. Personally I'd go for the Athlon, because they're better value and just as fast (if not faster). I can see a CPU war thread coming here :)

[parksie]

The newer Pentiums are clock-locked, so overclocking is not an option. Although, you can freeze them (as was done with an Athlon to get it up to 1GHz) to increase the speed. Personally, I went for a PIII, since I've always found Intel chips to get better support.

[HarryW]

My apologies, I meant 'newer celerons' not 'newer pentiums'. The celerons have actually been multiplier-locked all along as well, but they have much more flexibility and tolerance when it comes to changing front side bus speeds. I think the newer pentium IIIs are actually bus speed-locked too, just to totally cripple your overclocking prospects. AMD actually encourage it, sort of, that's how the 1 GHz boundary was initially broken, with an overclocked Athlon 800 with its own chiller unit attached to the case and surrounding the CPU.

next computer I am getting is gonna have at least 800mhz Athalon :D

I prefer Athalons over Pentiums, although I have only had 2 windows computers, and both were Pentiums, but I have used some computers with an Athalon and they were really fast...

[kovan]

i like to say few words about pentiums and athalons
i can go on forever on why athalon is better
but no need
simply
INTEL SUCKS, AMD RULEZ

[parksie]

Just to test...my 500MHz PIII just had a vicious attack on it's control jumpers...but it stubbornly stayed at it's usual 501MHz...damn.

The Duron chips look pretty good, though.

Wow, this Athlon thing is starting to sound good.
I'm changing the topic of this thread to PentiumIII vs. Athlon.

Any comments? Suggestions?

[CthulhuDragon]

Celeron is a economical Pentium with no cache at all. Then cames Celeron "A" with cache but external to the processor, that´s why Pentium II is faster, with its cache inside the chip. Pentium III is a newer processor, superior to both Pentium II and Celeron.

Sorry I have to correct this. Its the other way around. The celeron cache is internal and runs at the CPU speed(faster). The pII cache is external and runs at the bus speed(slower). The PII contains considerably more cache however and thats why it runs faster then the celeron which has less cache.

The celeron is really a good chip. It has a better cost/speed ration than the pentium IIs or IIIs, but if you want the best you need to go for the spendier chip.

[HarryW]

I vote Athlon, for reasons previously stated :)

[parksie]

The new Durons definitely look good, and the Athlons are technically better than the PIII, but support is the key.

[HarryW]

It is almost always better to have faster cache rather than lotso of cache. In oher words it's almost always better to have 256k of full speed than 512k of half speed cache.

[HarryW]

I know what you mean parksie, and I had that nagging feeling when I bought my Athlon too, but what's to support? Apart from the SSE that P3s have (which aren't that useful) Athlons aren't really much different. The only problems that arise are a result of the motherboard chipset, but I haven't had any problems with it personally. And I have a GeForce which I believe was very picky and awkward early on in the Athlon's career when I bought it, I've had no problems with it. I have a Gigabyte Ga-7IX m/b, with AMD 750 chipset.

[parksie]

I have a GA-6VXE, because I prefer the VIA chipset to Intel's.

[CthulhuDragon]

One more thing about the Celeron that needs to be mentioned. Aside from the Cache differences, the Celeron is very nearly identical to the PII. However, Intel purposely keeps the Celeron one bus speed behind the Pentium. E.G. when the PIIs were at 100 Mhz the Celeron was at 66 Mhz. The PIIIs are at 133Mhz and the Celeron should be at 100 Mhz (I haven't been keeping up, don't know if this came out or not). This makes a big impact on speed and accounts for much of the speed difference.

If I'm buying a new computer, should I take a PIII or AMD?
Do you know of any devices that don't support AMD?

[HarryW]

Not any more, as far as I am aware. There have been issues in the past, and I suspect most device drivers will be first written with Intel architecture in mind, and then revised for AMD hardware, but to be honest the difference in price and performance makes up my mind. I have had no problems and I have what was one of the most troublesome combinations in the early days of Athlon in my GeForce graphics card. I have never experienced any problems with it that were in any way related to the CPU or chipset.