Choose Dell Pentium II or Compaq Celeron (Pentium III Class)?

[VacuumTubeEra]

We have the opportunity to use either of the following two machines as a secondary computer. Since we already own both, cost is not an issue. Which would you recommend as a better choice for applications such as Word, Excel, minor photo editing (Microsoft Photo Editor 3.0), simple word games, and of course internet browsing & email? The operating system on either machine will be Windows 98SE. We will use a DMA 100 capable hard drive (I know that perfomace will be reduced by the old hardware).

Dell V350 - 350 MHz Pentium II with 100 MHz FSB, 384 MB RAM (the maximum), capable of DMA 33.
or
Compaq EP C500 - 500 MHz Celeron (Pentium III class) with 66 MHz FSB, 256 MB RAM (the maximum), capable of DMA 66.

Many Thanks for your thoughts.

 

[tokenjo]

Dell V350 - 350 MHz Pentium II with 100 MHz FSB, 384 MB RAM (the maximum), capable of DMA 33.

Istall an AGP video card or upgrade to at least a 64 MB card, if you can.

 

[dakota81]

I'd go with the Dell just because I've had bad experiences with Compaqs of about that era. One of the main places I work at, they have mostly older machines, as most of the work done requires no speed at all. Somewhere along the way we got two identical Celeron 600MHz machines, and by now one is completely screwed up hardware-wise, and the other is crawling at a such a slow pace that our 200MHz Pentium machines greatly outperform it.

Do no install a 64meg video card, that would be a complete waste of money. The programs that you are listing are all 2D based programs, and with the 2D Windows graphical environment, you will have absolutely no need for video ram above even 8megs. 8megs video ram gives you a resolution up to 1600x1200 @ 32bit color, and all the additional ram on the card will go unused providing no performance benifits. If you don't run 3D apps, there's no reason to buy a bulked up video card.

I don't know what size harddrive you have to put in; this is I think the only problem you may run into, and possibly the Dell could work with a PCI IDE controller, I don't know though...

 

[SkipCox]

The Celeron will easily out perform the PII, both will accept a better pci video card (cheapest 32Mb you can find), ATA100 capable hdd will give both max transfer rates...

The choice, with identical video cards, is the Compaq, even though it's running less memory and a lower fsb/less cache.

It'll just be faster, more reliable, and friendlier to later peripherials.

I should mention, there's nothing wrong with either machine for the intended uses.





Skip

http://home.comcast.net/~skip9/index.html

http://scc.i8.com

 

[jbotz]

Sorry Skip, but once again I have to disagree with you. While you are right on about being friendlier to later peripherals, it definitely will not be more reliable or faster. The cache size is what's going to kill it. I have personally run a P3-500 against a Celeron 1.7 (same RAM, same HD, etc.), and they were neck and neck. Based on that, I would have to say that the P2 would outperform the Celery, err, I mean Celeron processor.

 

[SirNuke]

The celeron in the compaq was one of the orginal celerons. When Intel made the celeron line, it needed a cheap processor fast to keep AMD from completly dominating the lower end cpu line (the k6-2 was cheaper than the p2, and almost same with performance). So Intel took the p3, stripped it's level 2 cache, and sold it for dirt cheap. The performance on the orignal celerons was abysal. In almost all cases, the p mmx with half the speed out performaned. Its disapointing the DMA 66 isn't on the dell, but thats how it goes. For just web browseing/office software, you don't need good video card. I had a 8mb sis video card I got for $15 about 4, maybe 5 years ago that worked well enough