Processor questions 5

[noob24]

Hi I am trying to get myself a new computer to replace my old AST Pentium I 100 Mhz

People tell me that I should look for processor speed. So here is what I'd like to know:

1 - What is the difference between Intel Celeron, Intel Pentium 4 and Intel Pentium M and why do people seem to smirk at or avoid Celerons? Are they that bad?

2 - Does a Celeron 1.5 Ghz = Pentium 4 1.5 Ghz = Pentium M 1.5 Ghz? If not, what can I do to compare and find out which one is faster?

3 - What is the difference between processor speed and RAM? Do I need both? Is it ok for me to have a super fast processor and very little RAM?

4 - What is Centrino Technology?

Those are my questions for now. Any help is greatly appreciated

 

[marcasii]

Intel Celeron is the badget version of Intel Pentium. So if possible go for a Pentium 4. Pentium M are mobile processors for notebooks.

The speeds do not match, a Pentium 4 is faster than Celeron and Pentium M.

Centrino is again a Mobile technology that is the combination of a Pentium M processor and Intel Wireless Lan

 

[pmonett]

People avoid Celerons because Intel voluntarily crippled their performance so as not to threaten P4 performance. With the new Celerons, Intel has somewhat revised this and they are better.
You can find all the explanations you need here.

Concerning CPU and memory speed : they are vastly different. CPU speeds are above the 3Ghz level, while RAM is barely hitting 800Mhz at best. But this has little to do with the amount of RAM you need. First of all, of course you need both. Without RAM, the CPU is severely hobbled - to the point that some motherboard makers will not allow a PC to boot if there is no RAM.
If you run a Windows OS, you will need an absolute minimum of 256MB to simply boot and do office stuff. 512MB is a much better figure, giving ample breathing room to the OS and the applications. More than 512MB is not really necessary unless you are a hardcode video editor, or you work with very memory-intensive applications.

Pascal.

 

[paparazi]

noob24
Intel have recently launched their new line of Celerons based on the Prescott core, they are identified with the letter D (Celeron D) these CPU's are actually not bad performers when compared to the older Northwood core based Celerons which had their onboard Cache and FSB drasticly cut.
The older Cererons (Pre 2004) were so bad that in a fairly recent review a Morgan core (266fsb) Duron 1400 soundly outperformed a Celeron 2.4!!
So if you go for a Celeron it must be a Celeron D that has comparable performance "close to" the equivelant AMD Athlon XP (same rated speed) Note* close to, the Athlon XP is still slightly quicker but at least the gap has closed some what.
I note* you are talking about 1.5ghz CPU's and I don't think this slow speed is still available?
A low end P4 800fsb CPU would be my advice from your choices but if it's performance on a tight budget then an AMD Athlon XP is still best "bang for buck" grab a "Barton core" XP2.5+ whilst they are still available!!!!! (soon to be phased out for the inferior Semeron) pair it with a cheap Nforce2 motherboard (Abit NF7 or Asus A7N8X) and you will have yourself a powerful "cheap" system and every bit as stable as a Celeron/P4.
If you Go for Intel be sure you "DON'T purchase a motherboard that uses the OLD SDram! these are severely bottlenecked.
A motherboard using Intels 865 chipset would be a good value choice.
Martin


We like members to GIVE and not just TAKE.
Participate and help others.

 

[shannanl]

I have used a mix of Celerons, XP and Pentium 4s. It all depends on what you are going to do. I have a Celeron in my laptop and am thrilled with it. I would never use a Celeron for hard core gaming. Never never skimp on ram. Buy good quality ram and at least 512K. Ram is cheap now and if you dont have enough you will notice poor performance in your computer. As I said, dont buy cheap stuff. It will give you fits. Centrinos are processors that if I am not mistaken are made for laptops or mobile applications where power is an issue. This will not be an issue for you if you are building a desktop. Buy a good quality motherboard also. Give yourself room for expansion.

Shannan

 

[BernardStewart]

I agree with all the above points of guidance. However, there is another bottleneck issue that needs to be considered depending on your application.

Gaming aside, lets say you work in word and produce long documents with lots of graphics. The size of the graphics card Video RAM matters a great deal.
I have had video cards with 4MB, 8M, 16,Mb, 32,Mb and 65Mb. The effect on the speed of page scrolling is extraordinarily dramatic. Between 4 and 64Mb the page scrolling time declines exponentially. The effect on performance and productivity is huge.

This should be less of a problem now that most graphics cards are reasonably fast. I’m not sure how some of the motherboards with onboard graphic chipsets (thus supposedly negating the need for a separate graphics card) fair under such tests.

In general I’ve found that the speed of the processor is less important than having high amounts of RAM and a good graphic card. Personally, I won’t now settle for less than 1Gb RAM. It doesn’t matter how fast the processor is if there are large bottlenecks elsewhere in the system.

Finally, good hard drives with disk cache also have a significant impact on some applications. So, for example, a Western Digital 80Mb drive with its own 8Mb cache significantly improves performance compared with some non cached drives. With disks such as these even the bloated applications of MS Office load in a millisecond versus the long wait you often see. Make sure you buy a good quality drive. Even the best drives fail remarkably often.

 

[noob24]

Thank you for all your feedback guys I learned a lot about CPU processors and RAM. I have a kept a copy of all your posts so I can re-read it in the future

 

[deekydoo]

Hi,

For non critical applications with very high [and economic] disk i/o performace consider two seagate 120 gig sata disks in RAID 0 configuration.

Deek