Re: Pentium vs Celeron

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From: cquirke (MVP Win9x) (cquirkenews_at_nospam.mvps.org)
Date: 03/29/04 

Date: Mon, 29 Mar 2004 16:07:21 +0200

On Fri, 26 Mar 2004 18:10:25 -0800, "Michael Solomon \(MS-MVP Windows

>Essentially, I agree with the following caveat, if builders can low ball the
>Pentium they can low ball the Celeron.

Yep. In fact, Intel's intention is that they should low-ball the
Celeron but not low-ball the P4. Hence the "fluff" notes on
motherboard chipsets etc. that position all the Micro-ATX trash as
"for Celeron" and the decent stuff as "for P4". Sometimes you really
have to scratch to find out that yes, you can build an i875P system
with a Celeron for now (of course, it won't do the 800MHz tango yet)

In practice, system builders use glossy parts where consumers look,
and dingy gunk everywhere they don't look. Intel has spent a lot of
money on indirect advertising and PR to make sure they look at
processors, or even just for the sticker on the front.

All those big OEMs who display that "Intel Inside" thing on their ads;
do you think they do that because they view that as an important
factor in the spec? Or because Intel shares the advert costs?

>My response was simply to point toward a comparison of the two
>processors, not two systems nor would I advise anyone to purchase
>based solely on processor.

Yep, I figured as much. I've seen some horribly misleading "buyer's
information" from Intel that basically says, processor uber alles.

>I'm currently in the midst of planning my next purchase and have written and
>posted the first in a series to cover it.

Like an earlier poster, my current box is i845G-based, for all the
reasons he mentioned :-)

Today, I'd build on i865G for most purposes, and i875P if I knew from
the outset that I wanted max speed (e.g. video editing).

>Right now, I'm amazed at the number of pretty good Pentium 4
>systems that come with shared memory.

I don't mind that if it isn't a life sentence (i.e. as long as there's
an AGP slot). Intel's built-in SVGA doesn't grab a full 32M the way
VIA/S3's does, so it's quite easy to live with (given that office
systems don't really need 32M of 3D textures).

Often the cost of the SVGA card (speed of which may be irrelevant to
the useage) rivals that of extra RAM. Hmm, add a GeForce 4 to spare
4M RAM, or add another 256M? Let me think about that for a nanosecond

>People get them home and when they try to play games or a DVD
>movie, at best it plays haltingly and at worst it crashes.

No problems with DVD so far, and games up to Serious Sam 2 run OK with
i845G and i865G built-in graphics. May be jerky at 1024x768, but
800x600 looks OK. You'd want to go up to FX5200 to get a clear speed
and quality boost, and they don't come free in corn flakes boxes yet.

>There's a race to the bottom mentality among computer manufacturer's today
>and I blame Dell for this and they are a prime example of exactly what
>you've mentioned. Their ads say, "Think you can't afford a Dell

If you can't afford to make a mistake, you can't afford any bottom-end
proprietary trash - of which Compaq are Exhibit A. They are the prime
example of leveraging a reputation for good kit (they were first 386
based PC, ahead of IBM; pretty cool) to sell trash. Bait and
switch... brand shenanigans seem to be US's main export product.

>However, upon close examination of that under $500 system that Dell
>has offered, you find a fine example of what you have stated, a good
>processor that is choked at every turn, a processor not allowed to breath
>and do its stuff. It may be fine for normal office work

But then, so would a Celeron have been. If that price delta had been
ploughed into doubling the HD and RAM, the thing would be much better

Anything that's up-spent on Pentium Tax should need no excuses. The
only excuse I had to make about a "build an audio recording system but
keep it around R 10k" PC I just done is that it has only one 120G HD.
But the door's not closed; the mobo I used has an additional Promise
RAID S-ATA controller onboard, so I can add another two 120G or larger
for workspace as and when their business plan requires.

The funny thing is, while I'm building these things, I can't really
feel the difference. Even the archive extraction phase of setup
(normally exquisitely sensitive to integer performance) feels much the
same on the budget 1.7GHz Celeron / 128M / 120G PC next to the 2.8GHz
P4 / 1G / 120G I'm building in the same batch. Even when running the
Sam 2 demo to (ahem) test the system feels pretty much the same.

Whip 'em in Cubase, with hoards of audio tracks dripping with effect
plug-ins, and that's when the nosebleeds start :-)

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