Celeron Processor question

[GaryShandling]

Is the slowest intel celeron based comp equivelant to a pentium 1 or 2 processor? will it be able to run DOS games and windows 95 efficiently? i want to use it to run very old games.

 

[AndyHui]

What speed Celeron?

The slowest Celeron, the 266 without cache, was equivalent in performance to a Pentium MMX 233MHz.

As for current Celerons, the slowest of the Pentium 4 class at 1.7GHz gives performance similar to the Pentium III 1.2GHz in Office Applications. However, the Pentium 4 based Celerons have mixed performance across a range of applications, so you should check if it suits your needs. You will run into quite a few problems trying to run Windows 95 on one of these systems though.

 

[Sunner]

You won't find any CPU out there that's anywhere near as slow as an old Pentium/P-MMX.
Gotta get some used box if you want that.

 

[vegetation]

Look for a pentium classic system. Slowest ever made was a P60, but stay away from them as they were buggy. P75's and P90's were pretty much mainstream machines back in its day. I would get at least a P133 if you want to run win95 smoothly though (with 32 megs of ram).

 

[MercenaryForHire]

Maybe you'd better define "very old". Are we still in 3D here, or have we gone all the way back to text?

- M4H

 

[GaryShandling]

Well, i want to play games like daggerfall, day of the tentacle, leisure suit larry e.t.c games from pre 98. Celeron does look overkill and win 95 problems put me off. so getting a pentium 133 or pentium MMX with 32 megs of ram should be ideal right?

Also whats the difference between MMX and a standard Mhz pentium?
Another thing is does win 98 have the same problems XP does with DOS games (and pre 1995)? Which out of win 95 and 98 is more ideal for running my specified games?

 

[DaveSimmons]

Win95 or Win98 and a P1 133 would be good for all DOS games. Get a small hard drive and format with FAT16 partition(s) instead of FAT32 so you can use a DOS 6 boot diskette if you need to. Or you could use Partition Magic + Boot Magic to create 2 C: drives, one with DOS 6 and one with Win95 / 98.

The desktop P1 at 133 didn't have MMX, 166 MHz was the first with MMX. No DOS games need MMX, and a 166 is starting to get a little fast for some DOS games. I'd stick with a 100 - 133. 32 MB of RAM should be enough.

You can pick up old P1 boards or even complete systems on eBay or placing a "WTB - London" post in the FS/FT forum.

Download "MoSlo" from tucows or elsewhere for any games that run too fast.