Dell Inspiron 11 - Celeron vs Pentium

[Saito S]

So, I've been seriously considering trying out Dell's Inspiron 11 for a few months now. When I first saw this computer being offered, it had only 2 GB of memory, which was a sticking point in a lot of reviews I read. This has now been updated to 4, so I'm gonna pull the trigger.

But, I know relatively little about Intel's mobile CPUs. There are two versions offered: Celeron N2815 and Pentium 3556u. The latter is a bit more expensive, and my general understanding is that a Pentium is usually superior to a Celeron, all else being equal, though the N2815 does have a higher clock speed according to the specs on them.

So, for anyone that DOES know a thing or two about the practical differences between a Celeron and a Pentium, which CPU would you recommend for this machine? Will the Pentium likely perform better in some ways despite the lower clock speed?

I'm not going to be trying to game on this computer, the only demanding things I'll be using it for are Gimp and one fairly CPU-intensive CAD-based mapping program that I'm hoping to be able to run on it.

Thanks in advance!

 

[VirtualLarry]

That particular Celeron chip is an Atom. I would avoid it, if possible. It may have a higher clock-speed, but it is certainly slower. It may have better battery life, however, due to lower TDP.

 

[mynameisjake]

Short answer: Pentium
Long answer: Pentium is a much better CPU.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Intel is deliberately confusing people now. The Celeron line is a mix of rebadged Atoms and cut-down Pentiums (which will still be be 2-5x as fast as the Atoms at the same clock speed.)

*scowl*

I actually have a couple of sandy-bridge and ivy-bridge based Celerons, and I <3 them for the capability@cost, but when people ask me for computer advice now it's going to be "Pentium or bust. Celerons are garbage." Which I haven't had to say for years.

Sad.

 

[pw257008]

Intel is deliberately confusing people now. The Celeron line is a mix of rebadged Atoms and cut-down Pentiums (which will still be be 2-5x as fast as the Atoms at the same clock speed.)

*scowl*

I actually have a couple of sandy-bridge and ivy-bridge based Celerons, and I <3 them for the capability@cost, but when people ask me for computer advice now it's going to be "Pentium or bust. Celerons are garbage." Which I haven't had to say for years.

Sad.

watch out, there are some Atom Pentiums too.

 

[code65536]

While avoid-all-Atoms was sensible back with those older in-order Atoms, the new OOO Bay Trail Atoms are actually pretty good. They share the Celeron and Pentium branding because they're actually comparable with the "big" ULV Celeron and Pentiums in terms of performance (while touting a lower TDP). For example, in benchmarks, my Dell Venue 8 Pro (Bay Trail Atom) beats my tertiary laptop (ULV Ivy Bridge Celeron) (and in terms of actual use, both feel fine).

 

[VirtualLarry]

While avoid-all-Atoms was sensible back with those older in-order Atoms, the new OOO Bay Trail Atoms are actually pretty good. They share the Celeron and Pentium branding because they're actually comparable with the "big" ULV Celeron and Pentiums in terms of performance (while touting a lower TDP). For example, in benchmarks, my Dell Venue 8 Pro (Bay Trail Atom) beats my tertiary laptop (ULV Ivy Bridge Celeron) (and in terms of actual use, both feel fine).

No. Just no. Whatever benchmark shows them to be comparable in performance is broken. ST performance of Bay Trail is NOWHERE NEAR even a Celeron Core chip.

 

[Charlie98]

and one fairly CPU-intensive CAD-based mapping program that I'm hoping to be able to run on it.

I wonder if 4GB of RAM and a Pentium will be enough...

 

[cubby1223]

So, I've been seriously considering trying out Dell's Inspiron 11 for a few months now. When I first saw this computer being offered, it had only 2 GB of memory, which was a sticking point in a lot of reviews I read. This has now been updated to 4, so I'm gonna pull the trigger.

But, I know relatively little about Intel's mobile CPUs. There are two versions offered: Celeron N2815 and Pentium 3556u. The latter is a bit more expensive, and my general understanding is that a Pentium is usually superior to a Celeron, all else being equal, though the N2815 does have a higher clock speed according to the specs on them.

So, for anyone that DOES know a thing or two about the practical differences between a Celeron and a Pentium, which CPU would you recommend for this machine? Will the Pentium likely perform better in some ways despite the lower clock speed?

I'm not going to be trying to game on this computer, the only demanding things I'll be using it for are Gimp and one fairly CPU-intensive CAD-based mapping program that I'm hoping to be able to run on it.

Thanks in advance!

Oh my gawd is the Celeron version amazingly underpowered!

I'm not kidding, this happens quite often Windows 8 has to completely stall out for about 10 seconds where you have no keyboard or mouse control, just so it can catch up with all the processing it has to do.

I know someone who bought the Inspiron 11 with the Celeron. Don't make the same mistake.


My personal advice to people is buy at a minimum a Core i3, or don't buy a laptop at all. The added expense is worth every penny.

 

[raildogg]

Oh my gawd is the Celeron version amazingly underpowered!

I'm not kidding, this happens quite often Windows 8 has to completely stall out for about 10 seconds where you have no keyboard or mouse control, just so it can catch up with all the processing it has to do.

I know someone who bought the Inspiron 11 with the Celeron. Don't make the same mistake.


My personal advice to people is buy at a minimum a Core i3, or don't buy a laptop at all. The added expense is worth every penny.

But that personal advice is based on stuff you do. It may or may not be useful at all to the other person. I have used a couple year old Celeron-based laptop and it is fine for most tasks. The newer Celerons might be even better. I'm pretty sure the Pentiums would be fine for the vast amount of people out there.

If your situation needs a specific "fast" processor, then maybe spend the extra money. I know its been said many times before but: A baseline processor bought today is good enough for the stuff you do unless your one of the few who requires extra power for whatever specialized software you use.

 

[code65536]

No. Just no. Whatever benchmark shows them to be comparable in performance is broken. ST performance of Bay Trail is NOWHERE NEAR even a Celeron Core chip.

When I benched my Bay Trail Atom vs. my Ivy Bridge ULV Celeron, the Atom handily won every multithreaded benchmark (which wasn't surprising, considering it was 4c/4t going up against 2c/2t). It did lose the single-threaded benchmark, but not by huge margins (IIRC, it was something like 75% of the ST performance).

But that personal advice is based on stuff you do. It may or may not be useful at all to the other person.

Indeed. Plus, I'm not sure I'd blame it on the CPU.

When I got my ULV Celeron laptop, it was virtually unusable out of the box, but that wasn't really the CPU's fault--that was the fault of a slow spinning HDD coupled with a ton of OEM shovelware. Put in a SSD, clean-installed the OS, and the system feels just as snappy and responsive as my desktop. Of course I can tell the difference if I do something CPU intensive like compressing a bunch of files, but in terms of everyday things (and in particular UI responsiveness), CPUs had stopped mattering years ago.

 

[cubby1223]

But that personal advice is based on stuff you do. It may or may not be useful at all to the other person. I have used a couple year old Celeron-based laptop and it is fine for most tasks. The newer Celerons might be even better. I'm pretty sure the Pentiums would be fine for the vast amount of people out there.

If your situation needs a specific "fast" processor, then maybe spend the extra money. I know its been said many times before but: A baseline processor bought today is good enough for the stuff you do unless your one of the few who requires extra power for whatever specialized software you use.

We're far beyond the days where it is acceptable to start the computer on a task and go grab a cup of coffee waiting for it to complete.

Not all celerons are the same. A celeron of a few years ago may be faster than a celeron of today. And your celeron of the past may be more capable of handling Windows 7 than a celeron of today is of handling Windows 8.

I have personally used the exact specific laptop model asked about in this thread. It is woefully underpowered.


The core processors have the processing power and the graphics power to handle the smoothness of the new Windows OS with near perfection, and have tremendous power saving mechanisms to keep the laptop cool and quiet. Smoothness, temperature, and noise matter to people, and it takes a laptop that is just okay as a tool to accomplish tasks and turns it into something special to appreciate. We're talking usually within $100 price difference or less, we're not talking hundreds of dollars of difference as was the case years ago between levels of laptops.

Then put in an ssd if you want. But find me a laptop priced ~$400 with an ssd that I can recommend someone go purchase on their own without having to deal with an added service expense swapping drives for an ssd. If someone comes to me for advice on laptop purchases, that person doesn't know how to swap drives on their own.

 

[code65536]

We're far beyond the days where it is acceptable to start the computer on a task and go grab a cup of coffee waiting for it to complete.

Then pop in a SSD. Don't blame the CPU for problems caused by dinosauric storage.

 

[Saito S]

This sparked more of a discussion than I thought! Didn't mean to be gone from my own thread for so long, things have been rather busy. I appreciate all the replies.

From what I can gather, it sounds like the Pentium is the better bet overall.

I wonder if 4GB of RAM and a Pentium will be enough...

Well, the 4GB of RAM will "be enough", because it's a 32-bit program, heh. It's a mapping program called CC3. It's quirky and damn finicky sometimes, but it allows for making professional looking maps for RPGs and stories with far less of a learning curve than for say, Photoshop, with a lot of specialized, semi-automated tools (to say nothing of the difference in price!).

So the processor is the main point of contention when it comes to the question of whether or not it will run. Thus, what I'm hoping to do is at some point just buy one of these Inspirons and give it a whirl - it will either run well or it won't, and then I can decide whether or not to keep the computer.

That said, I'll be waiting a bit anyway, as it turns out. For one, some other things have come up that have thrown a bit of a financial monkey wrench into the plan - even just a $300 machine is not in the cards at the moment. So I have to wait another couple months anyway. Which may be good, because there is actually a pretty major upgrade/overhaul to CC3 coming, one which will streamline some of the (rather ancient) code and make the whole thing run a lot more smoothly. It's supposed to be coming out in the next few months, hopefully. So, I might as well wait until that's out and test IT, rather than the current/old CC3, on any new laptop I try.

Oh my gawd is the Celeron version amazingly underpowered!

I'm not kidding, this happens quite often Windows 8 has to completely stall out for about 10 seconds where you have no keyboard or mouse control, just so it can catch up with all the processing it has to do.

I know someone who bought the Inspiron 11 with the Celeron. Don't make the same mistake.


My personal advice to people is buy at a minimum a Core i3, or don't buy a laptop at all. The added expense is worth every penny.

I'd be absolutely willing to go up to, say, 500-600 or so in terms of price range to get a Core i3 rather than a Pentium or Celeron. I'd even be willing to go with a full $1000+ ultrabook if I could find one that I liked. See, I actually tried a couple of ultrabooks back in December-January. One was the Acer Aspire s7 392 and the other the HP Spectre 13t 3000 (both purchased with twelve-month no-interest financing, or there would have been no way for me to even consider either!). Alas, I returned both - both were very nice machines in a lot of ways, but both simply suffered from some aggravating design flaws that I simply was not willing to just suffer with for the next several years, not after dropping 1000+ on a machine.

There are other laptops I've looked at, but the problem is that I have a couple of specific criteria I'm not really willing to bend on that have made my options more limited: 3 pounds (or a little over, i.e. 3.3 would be ok) weight or lighter, and at least 6-7 hours of battery life with "normal" use. This is because, for the last few years, I've been carrying around a little 2.8 pound netbook that gets 10 hours of battery life. It's getting a little long in the tooth (as is Windows XP, which is what it runs), but man, I do love having a computer that light and rarely having to worry about bringing my charger. So, I'd like to replace it with something a bit faster (and that can run CC3 if possible, which the netbook absolutely cannot), but still meeting those two criteria. I don't have a lot of specific requirements for performance because, outside of CC3, I won't be doing anything truly demanding with whatever I buy, so the weight and battery take precedence for me. Thus, there are a lot of "middle-end" laptops that aren't really in consideration due to not meeting one, the other, or both points, even if they might be good in other ways. I'm completely agnostic as to Windows 7 vs 8 - I'm not 8s biggest fan, but after tinkering with it with the ultrabooks I tried, I've found I can tweak it to get rid of a lot of what I don't like about it, so I'd be fine with it. So that, at least, isn't an issue.

When the Inspiron 11 popped up, I thought I had to at least give it a look, because if it's just fast and reliable enough for what I need, it's a steal at that price, and meets both my deal-breaker criteria.

 

[MarkizSchnitzel]

I don't know, my T100 with BayTrail is running windows quite fine. Especially considering that for many things there really are good alternatives from the store which are undemanding for the CPU.

 

[Imaginer]

Looks to me that Campaign Cartographer 3's hardware requirements isn't much at all.

Other than suggesting the SSD manual upgrade (you would appreciate it if you would switch and multitask which any computer user will run into soon or later), there shouldn't be much of a difference in a current Celeron or Pentium for such a purpose.

I would vouch for the Pentium, as even it is listed as a higher TDP, most often, with automatic power options that can be set in the OS, can provide the battery life as needed - while also would alleviate what you had in some performing issues with netbooks if you need to have that extra performance. It also supports more extensions which if CC3 takes advantage of (or other software in the next few years) then it would be a nice headroom to work with.

But if you like a bit more battery life unplugged, that Celeron choice isn't bad either. Both come configured with the needed memory for CC3 that you are going to run.

 

[gbeirn]

I have the Inspiron 11 with the Haswell based Celeron 2955U. I upgraded the RAM to 8GB and put in an SSD. It is a solid little machine with great battery life.

See my little review here: http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2355208&highlight=

 

[AViking]

My problem with these is that the CPU benches about the same as my Core2Duo that I had 8 years ago. That's with the 2955U and the 3556U. With the N2815 you're in Netbook territory. How practical can it really be? My netbook struggles to play Youtube videos and is slow as balls.

Seems like it's worth spending a few more dollars.