Former Netburst Celeron's vs todays Celeron's / Pentium's

[GMasonDragonDad]

I had a Celeron 400 that ended up getting upgraded to a P3 @650 that took me from Win98->2000->XP.

I used it to "rip" my vinyl albums into MP3s and remaster them into audio CDs. Also went from dial-up to DSL internet

My first email to my future wife was from that CPU.

Good times...

 

[blackened23]

Celeron 300a. One of the all time best overclocking CPUs ever. It really is too bad that the celeron line became relegated to the extreme low end at times over the years, because the 300a belongs in the CPU hall of fame. 🙂

I think the Haswell and Ivy celerons are pretty decent for daily driving and HTPC use. They're really close to the Haswell and Ivy Pentiums in terms of performance, but the price difference is so small, I don't see a huge reason to get the celly over haswell Pentium.

 

[Insert_Nickname]

Celeron 300a. One of the all time best overclocking CPUs ever. It really is too bad that the celeron line became relegated to the extreme low end at times over the years, because the 300a belongs in the CPU hall of fame. 🙂

Indeed... 🙂

 

[zir_blazer]

Do anyone remembers what the Celeron 300A was replacing? I agree than it was designed to suck and catch naive consumers - like the high-Frequency null-performance NetBurst Celerons. The Mendocinos were pretty much a miracle, caused by Intel backpedaling.

 

[Lorne]

I have a bunch of older CPU systems laying around.
What test would be good to run on these older CPUs and what OS to use, It will have to be 32bit of course?
Remember this is CPU test only, not gfx, I dont want to set up a system and let spend 2 days trying to run Handbrake or

 

[jhu]

I have a bunch of older CPU systems laying around.
What test would be good to run on these older CPUs and what OS to use, It will have to be 32bit of course?
Remember this is CPU test only, not gfx, I dont want to set up a system and let spend 2 days trying to run Handbrake or

Povray! It'd be interesting to see how slow these porocessors are on current rendering software. I had an old Pentium (non MMX) computer that I threw away 2 years ago. Should have kept it just for testing purposes. Now my oldest computer is a Pentium !!! laptop.

 

[pantsaregood]

http://techreport.com/review/5159/intel-pentium-4-c-processors
http://www.cpu-world.com/Compare/722/Intel_Celeron_D_341_vs_Intel_Pentium_4_515___515J.html

The jump from 533 MHz FSB to 800 MHz FSB yielded relatively small gains. The jump from 800 MHz FSB to 1066 MHz FSB yielded even smaller gains. Here you can see that in almost all benchmarks that do not specifically stress the memory subsystem, the FSB speed has a very minimal impact on performance.

In the case of the benchmarks that were provided, however, a 400 MHz FSB Celeron was used in benchmarks that are especially cache-sensitive. Celerons gained a lot more from the transition to Prescott than Pentium 4s did. Once a CPU has enough cache to avoid fetching from RAM constantly and a fast enough connection to RAM to avoid constant saturation of bandwidth, increasing cache/bandwidth isn't very beneficial.

Also, a 15% difference between Celerons and their Pentium 4 counterparts is, in most cases, not very far-fetched. Celerons weren't nearly as "bad" in comparison to "high-end" CPUs in 2003 as they are now.

Take a Celeron G470 and compare it to a Core i7-4970X. The i7-4960X's computational power is (theoretically) up to 10.8 times that of the Celeron G470. During the NetBurst era, a disparity of that magnitude would've been unimaginable.

At that point in time, a Celeron D at 2.13 GHz could be expected to yield roughly 40% of the performance of a 3.8 GHz Pentium 4. The Celeron D launched at a list price of about $49, while the 3.8 GHz Prescott launched at $851. 17 times the price for about 2.5 times the performance back then - now we're looking at an i7-4960X being 28 times the price of a $37 Celeron. The market is far more segmented now than it has ever been.

 

[pw257008]

well, it'd make a lot more sense to compare a g1820 than a g470

 

[Captante]

Celeron 300a. One of the all time best overclocking CPUs ever. It really is too bad that the celeron line became relegated to the extreme low end at times over the years, because the 300a belongs in the CPU hall of fame. 🙂

The Celeron 366 wasn't too shabby either! 🙂


I also recall briefly playing around with a Tulatin-core Celeron 1.4 ghz chip in a "slocket" adapter on an Abit BE6-2 BX chipset board. At the time it was pretty damn fast compared to the P4.

 

[Insert_Nickname]

Once a CPU has enough cache to avoid fetching from RAM constantly and a fast enough connection to RAM to avoid constant saturation of bandwidth, increasing cache/bandwidth isn't very beneficial.

That we do agree on, but the main issue with early Willamette and Northwood Celerons where their paltry 128KB L2 cache. Prescott Celerons where at least "usable", and quite good overclockers. Willamette/Northwood Celerons simply weren't, not then, not now.

Cedar Mill Celerons where also quite good, indeed they could almost match Northwood P4's. Unfortunately the world had just been Conroe'd, which made them seem bad choices compared to both Core2's and Athlon64's...

 

[VirtualLarry]

That we do agree on, but the main issue with early Willamette and Northwood Celerons where their paltry 128KB L2 cache. Prescott Celerons where at least "usable", and quite good overclockers. Willamette/Northwood Celerons simply weren't, not then, not now.

Cedar Mill Celerons where also quite good, indeed they could almost match Northwood P4's. Unfortunately the world had just been Conroe'd, which made them seem bad choices compared to both Core2's and Athlon64's...

These points, I completely agree on. Northwood Celerons (and their predecessors) were pretty darn slow chips. Slower than their clock speed alone would suggest.