why not Celeron

[happyhero]

Hi, Often heard people saying dont buy Celeron when buying a PC, buy Pentium, can anybody tell me in simple terms what the difference is and what it means to the PC user ie any performance differences.

Surely the price difference between Celeron and Pentium is there for a reason.

Heavy users seem to buy Pentium every time and pay the extra for it, and presumably some heavy users know what they are doing when paying out more to have it.

Any info would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Igorian]

Have a look here.

 

[happyhero]

Cheers again Igorian, its basically as I thought, many little performance differences.

My daughter is about to buy a laptop for college and I told her not to get Celeron because I was told that when buying a PC in the past, but I could not remember exactly why. I know she will soon say to me "WHY", so I thought I better make sure I know.

I read a bit on the internet too, I think the answer I will give her is that you pay more and get a higher performance machine for your money which can do things faster and cope much better with anything intensive.

 

[Igorian]

Have a look at the Centrino processor laptops.

 

[happyhero]

Hi Igorian, Yes I thought a Centrino might be a good idea for her as they seem to be truly portable lightweight and wireless ready, probably ideal for the job.

Although I understand that GHz are faster than they make you think they are ie they appear at first glance to be really slow GHz speeds and are in fact quite fast.

The bit that leaves me doubting them though is that for example my daughter is looking at spending about £600 and looking around you may be lucky enough to get a Pentium M 1.6GHz.

This seems to relate to a 2.4GHz machine when comparing speed with a Pentium, but these days most people are looking at buying PC's of 3GHz and over, so if this equivalent to a 2.4 isn't it going to be a bit slow, I mean you would not go out these days and buy a 2.4 Pentium new, would you?

Can you shed any light on this bit please?

 

[breezer]

for what its worth this pc (desktop) has an amd athlon 1.2g

 

[2scoops0406]

I'm not sure I understand what you are saying when you say that one speed of processor compares to another ? The main reason that components in Laptops are slower than their desktop brothers is generally down to heat output. Most laptop parts are "derated" so that cooling, and hnece power consumption doesn't become a problem.

The apparent speed of a computer is to do with many factors, the clock speed of the CPU being just one of these. There are other factors such as graphics cards, memory, HDD etc etc, all of which have an influence.

I think the don't touch celeron chips with a barge pole is really a throw back to the times when they didn't have any L2 cache, I'm sure the article referred to explains it in far greater depth than I could hope to, but suffice to say, this did significantly affect performance. Now that celerons do have a limited amount of L2 cache, the problem is not so manifest.

AS regard to people buying 3.0 Ghzand above, well so be it, but I reckon all other things being equal, a 2.4 Ghz Processor would be fine for pretty much all situations.

 

[empip]

There exists a Toshiba lap top from Dabs.com in our family, it has taken a fair old battering web ... music .. dvd's ... oh yes, course work too .... now 3.5 yrs old and never given cause for concern ...... it cost £700 ish when new.
I had some misgivings about being 'Celeron' equipped, but the thing has done all that has been asked of it by a student ... A good buy !! ...
Todays equivalent, (NB. comes with XP Pro):-
LINK
£521.68 inc vat, nicely inside budget ..
NEED carry bag/case (£20 ish) etc and student M$ Office (£85 ish)..
Around £626 does the business..

 

[vmtaylor]

Pcs these days (desktop and laptop) are so powerful, you really do not use anywhere near the full capacity of the machine unless you are running really new games.
Dell are selling some cracking laptops now for between £400 and £500 direct from their site. Well worth a look.

 

[gazza2]

look at morgan computers for a cheap laptop ( try the brand embargo ) or MSI ones for spec

 

[empip]

Pcs these days (desktop and laptop) are so powerful, you really do not use anywhere near the full capacity of the machine unless you are running really new games.
Dell are selling some cracking laptops now for between £400 and £500 direct from their site. Well worth a look.

I am pretty confirmed Dell person, but my wife's new'ish Dell laptop .. Is surprisingly not as responsive as the old Toshiba? with similar spec.

 

[kendor]

whatever you go for you can be absolutely certain that 6 months down the line you'll need to upgrade as Windows ZM will be released closely followed by ZX( just needs the 80 added )