Celeron 1.7 --> P4 1.6 (256 cache) - worth an upgrade IYO?

[Booster]

I'm puzzling over this. Should I do it? The total cost would be $40. I got a guy I know who would buy my Celeron 1.7 chip for $40, and another one who wants to sell his P4 1.6 with 256KB of cache (socket 478, though) for $80. So the total cost of an upgrade would be $40.

Yes, I'm concerned with this money a little, but also with the time I'd have to spend disassembling the PC and going through all that crap again. So I want to ask experienced people...

Is there any noticeable performance difference between these two chips? I do only pretty basic stuff on my PC... Nothing special, not even gaming, the most demanding task for it is to encode DivX videos (but according to benchmarks these two chips should be even in that respect).

And pls don't send me to read AT or THG reviews, I hardly believe them when it comes to Celeron performance. For example, back in the days I had a Celeron 800 and the reviews said it was 15% slower than a PIII 800, but in reality it was unbearably slow compared to a PIII 800. Much slower than 15%, perhaps 40% slower.

Why I even think about this upgrade opportunity - WinXP lags on my PC!!! It takes several seconds for applications to run, start, etc, and sometimes it drives me nuts. Especially when burning CDs and trying to open the explorer window... that's a long delay.

How do you think, will that P4 eliminate or shorten these unpleasant delays? I'm running XP Pro.

Also... other system specs:
motherboard - ECS P4S5A/DX+ (SIS 645DX chipset, workds fine after BIOS upgrade)
memory - 1 stick of 256MB PC2700 DDR
harddrive - not what's slowing the system down, Seagate Bar. IV 60GB

Thanks for any replies in advance.

 

[LesPaul]

how much RAM do you have in your system? XP loves memory and must be fed. A memory upgrade might get you more performance than a CPU upgrade. As for the Celeron to P4 upgrade.. I don't know, I haven't used an intel CPU since the Pentium Pro.

 

[Booster]

Originally posted by: LesPaul
how much RAM do you have in your system? XP loves memory and must be fed. A memory upgrade might get you more performance than a CPU upgrade. As for the Celeron to P4 upgrade.. I don't know, I haven't used an intel CPU since the Pentium Pro.

I have 256MB. It's very little, but it's still enough for my needs. No matter what I do, the memory usage doesn't go higher than 200MB at the most (I haven't been playing games lately).

 

[Chumpman]

You will be suprised how much faster Windows XP runs if you add another 256 stick of memory.

 

[Booster]

Originally posted by: Chumpman
You will be suprised how much faster Windows XP runs if you add another 256 stick of memory.

I used to have 512MB of SDRAM in this system, then I removed the second stick, limiting the memory size to only 256MB. Frankly, I didn't notice any difference at all even after a few weeks of usage. Maybe extra RAM stick wouldn't help me this time.

 

[amoralist]

i have a amdxp 2100+ and winxp lags on my comp too. that said, i would never own a celeron. of course you should
upgrade if you have a motherboard capable of doing 133fsb and you can buy a 1.6A or 1.8A CPU. it easily overclocks
to 2.1+ for 1.6A just by running the mb at 133 instead of 100. my mom's comp is an overclocked 1.6A with stock cooling.

 

[Sahakiel]

With 256K cache, it ain't gonna be an 'A' chip (Northwood).

That said, I doubt you'll see much improvement. Maybe if it was a Northwood, there'd be a chance, but I think 256 is still starving the CPU during cache misses. Not as bad as 128, but, that's like comparing running XP Pro with 128 vs 256.
Speaking of which, I think your biggest concern may not be the CPU. If you're running PC100/PC133 SDRAM, that'd probably be your main bottleneck at the moment.