extreme budget build

[Torn Mind]

According to that link (in reply to Torn Mind), the Celeron 420 is faster than a Pentium 4 3.6Ghz. Of course, the Celeron 440 is faster still.

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/92?vs=72
Well, the P4 wins some and loses some. Probably, a lower-clocked one loses them all.

Passmark averages all of their results together. So there is a little variance you have to account for. You won't always get the average amount. You'll have a better chance to get a higher Passmark with the Celeron, yes, but it might not matter in the real world.

I didn't read your edit earlier this morning and that you were considering a high clocked dual core, but regardless, the single-core computing would be just plain awful with either the Celeron or the P4, especially on a slow hard drive. An E4300 goes for 15 bucks, but your Pentium Dual-Core has much higher clockspeed.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Intel-Core-...OEM-/271168813655?pt=CPUs&hash=item3f22ebba57
http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listi...condition=used

Single core computing sucks in part because there are a bunch of process threads(an executable amount of code) competing for CPU time and interfering with each other. A dual core or Hyperthreading remedies some of that interference since those threads can be executed simultaneously.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Well, I did originally build the rig for the neighbor lady with a Celeron 440 board, and an Intel ITX board, and a SATA-to-IDE converter, and an 80GB WD IDE drive I got refurb from Newegg.

Performance was a tad bit underwhelming.

So a few months later, I replaced the mobo with a Sandy Bridge Celeron 847 1.1Ghz dual-core CPU-integrated ITX mobo, and a 90GB Agility 2 SSD. Performance was much better. I forget how much RAM I put in, but it was DDR3, maybe I put in 4GB.