what would be better, a 800mhz pentium or a 1200mhz celeron. i know thw pentium has more l1 cache but thats the only difference i could find. is that enought to make it run better?

 

There are valid reasons why Pentium based PCs cost more than Celeron types and here's why:


http://www.cpuscorecard.com/cpufaqs/sep99c.htm

http://www.scinet.cc/articles/celero...n-pentium.html

http://istore.saintmarys.edu/?q=intel

If you're gonna play videogames, the Celeron is mediocre for that application. P4 processor/MOBOs are easy to come by for reasonably cheap. Heck, this very 'puter I'm typing this reply on cost me $21.00 US for the MOBO, case and pwr. supply. From there I upgraded support hardware for a P4 1.8Ggig, genuine Intel MOBO, 1gig C-RIMM RAM, 512MB ATI Radeon GPU, Turtle Beach 5.1 audio, media card reader, 160GB WD Caviar HDD, USB 2.0 expansion, 3Com NIC, Ricoh DVD/RW, Lite-on CD/RW, 450w PSU all for well under $200.00 And the PC has 5 cooling fans!

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Do you play games?

Are you bothered about having a fast PC?

I'd just buy the cheapest but that's just me.

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Yeah, that's something I failed to mention--- if all you plan to do is internet surf, maybe a few WORD documents, some low intensity graphics games, etc. then a Celeron will do for ya. I merely gave my particular example of my PC's specs to show that you can build a decent 'puter for cheap if you look around for the parts and have the time and know how. Otherwise, buy one already packaged and ready to go.

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Cache stores data used a lot by the processor, if you're doing anything processor intensive, then go with Pentium, otherwise go with Celeron if your needs are low.

 

I would go for the celeron because the 800mhz pentium could be an old "Coppermine" pentium III with 256Mb level 2 cache whereas the 1200 Celeron could be the later "Tualatin-256" version which also has 256Mb cache.

There are several other factors I would consider in choosing a cpu, such as having a low power consumption to keep cooling fan noise down and other main components which can affect performance more than the cpu such as memory size and HD.

 

PIII > P4

in fact quite alot is > P4.
The P4 was a P.O.S. CPU!!! more interested in clock-spead then performance. It used Intel's "Netburst" arch with an instruction pipeline > 30 instructions deep. Sure great for multimedia (mp3,dvd...) but chuck any number cruncher app at it (including games) and it just falls over!!!

I had a Pentium-M (mobile optimised PIII chip) 1.6GHz run circles (in a MAtlab benchmark model I made ) round a dual-core P4 3GHz, and yes it was a matlab that was multi-thread aware

The only thing the P4 is good for is as a heater, it runs sooo HOT!!!

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i must say that i am not impressed by the p4 either. i really dont notice a big difference from the pentium 111 even though its faster

 

At work we have dozens of P4s systems running CAD, special polymer engineering software and other number ingtensive pgms without any issues. The P4 is a fine processor IMHO.

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have a read of this
http://omploader.org/vNnp6

These are the results I took when I was trying to convince our work that a P4-2.0GHz,256Meg RAM (the real issue) is NOT acceptable for simulation work

The P4 is... ok as far as a x86 complant universal state machine, but as a good example of it... it is not. The P3 was alot better and that is why Intel went back to the P3 design when they designed their Core2 chipset

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Usually a Celeron has almost 1/2 or 1/4 (or lesser) of the Pentium/Core's cache sizes.

The newer Celeron 4xx (no D) are not using the older Netburst architecture, they used the Core ones, and they are really good performers, and runs at only a mere 35W. Surprisingly, the heatsink is 1/2 size of the casual Core heatsinks. My Celeron 420 really works neck-to-neck with my old Pentium 4 531 (sold already to some other people) and it's worth a buy.

Previously, Celerons are usually crippled, and to make things worse the low cache (for Celeron D) 256K and 533MHz FSB, it isn't going anywhere if you plan to game and do some heavy simulation on it.

 

both the pentium and the celeron are old school, don't buy either for a new computer, only accept them as freebies.

pentium has been superseded by the core 2, which is also called the centrino in laptops. the celeron is still out there, but consider an amd processor over a celeron.

some vendors are stuck with huge inventories of old pentium chips, and try to push them on you with attractive prices and confusing numbers. favor core 2 with 'lower' numbers over pentium with 'higher' numbers. for example a 2ghz core 2 versus a 3ghz pentium 4 ... core 2 hands down.

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I hate intel chips because of the low l2 caches. If i have a slow CPU with a large l2, i can be more productive than a fast cpu with a small l2.


My current machine;

Shuttle XPC SK22G2 V2
AMD ATHLON X2 64 5600+ (2.8GHz w/ 2x 1MB L2)
2GB Corsair Ballistix DDR2 RAM (w/ heatsinks)
PCI-E 16x nVIDIA GeForce 7600 GS (256 MB)
500GB SATA HD
250 watt power supply
DVD+/-RW
running Ubuntu Linux 7.1 (gusty)

Has blown any other computer i have EVER used out of the water. This thing is slick.





Anyways, to answer the op's question, i would take the 1.2GHz. I say that because it could be overclocked to be more. As other's have said, i would actually want a PIII, as they are a bit more stable (in my experience)

My laptop has a Celeron in it (1.3GHz), and it is slower than crap. But, it is a world more stable than any P4 i have ever used.

I guess my opinion is a bit biased because, being a freelance tech, i have never really had to fix computers with celerons in them, they are always P4s. They are really unstable. But, then again, people don't know how to take care of their computers.

My last computer job (P4 btw....), a squirrel got between the client's transformer, which caused a HV surge trough the house, and blew out the PSU in the computer. So, i got it home (thinking that the whole computer would quite possibly be shot, so i started to prepare for hard drive data recovery), and popped open the case. OMG!!!!!! I wish i would have taken pictures! They had dogs in the house... There was about 6 inches of dog hair (not an exaggeration) on just about every component, including the CPU heatsink!


ok. i have done enough babbling for now.

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