Intel Pentium J2900 - 2.67 GHz Quad Core

[escrow4]

That system is a mini-itx case Desktop, it is very small and quiet. You can put it bellow your TV or on-top of your desktop. You can even upgrade it later with a new 14nm ATOM based BGA mobo/APU. It is not the fastest in its price but it sure has everything anyone is looking for this type of PC and it also has the lowest power consumption.
The Performance those APUs have is adequate for everyday usage like browsing, video playback, light office and more.

Its junk. I wouldn't be surprised if the upcoming Galaxy S5 will be faster. If you want a dirt cheap box don't drop lower than a G1820, or a G3220 if you can swing in. Otherwise it won't be pretty. You are buying a substandard box straight away.

 

[AtenRa]

Its junk. I wouldn't be surprised if the upcoming Galaxy S5 will be faster. If you want a dirt cheap box don't drop lower than a G1820, or a G3220 if you can swing in. Otherwise it won't be pretty. You are buying a substandard box straight away.

Having a mini-itx mobo + G1820 or G3220 is not cheaper than those ATOM based Celeron/Pentiums. Also you get higher power consumption and higher noise.

One more thing, those Baytrail Desktop have just been released in the retail and they command a higher price, give them a few weeks and the price will start to fall.

 

[escrow4]

Having a mini-itx mobo + G1820 or G3220 is not cheaper than those ATOM based Celeron/Pentiums. Also you get higher power consumption and higher noise.

One more thing, those Baytrail Desktop have just been released in the retail and they command a higher price, give them a few weeks and the price will start to fall.

Higher noise, definitely not, Haswell celeron's, like IVB ones sip power, and the slightly higher power consumption is irrelevant:

http://www.techspot.com/review/681-amd-a10-6800k-a4-4000/page8.html

Stressed in Prime95 peak was 58w, in normal usage it would be a lot less. As for the price, for $400 you can do a lot better. Mini-ITX I'd agree, but you'd mATX anyway.

 

[pw257008]

Higher noise, definitely not, Haswell celeron's, like IVB ones sip power, and the slightly higher power consumption is irrelevant:

http://www.techspot.com/review/681-amd-a10-6800k-a4-4000/page8.html

Stressed in Prime95 peak was 58w, in normal usage it would be a lot less. As for the price, for $400 you can do a lot better. Mini-ITX I'd agree, but you'd mATX anyway.

And the Kabini 5350 (probably higher power consumption than BT Pentiums) hit 20W in a Linux benchmark suite: http://www.servethehome.com/Workstation-detail/amd-athlon-5350-linux-benchmarks-review/

So the difference in power consumption is real.

 

[pw257008]

Seems like you have never been to Best Buy before. What they want to do is trick the buyer into thinking that a E-series is better than the Core CPUs and pay more for it to boot.

Where do you find E1s selling for more than i3s?

 

[AtenRa]

Higher noise, definitely not, Haswell celeron's, like IVB ones sip power, and the slightly higher power consumption is irrelevant:

http://www.techspot.com/review/681-amd-a10-6800k-a4-4000/page8.html

Stressed in Prime95 peak was 58w, in normal usage it would be a lot less. As for the price, for $400 you can do a lot better. Mini-ITX I'd agree, but you'd mATX anyway.

Those ATOM based Celerons/Pentiums are Fan-less, Haswell Celerons/Pentiums have higher noise, especially when the heat-sink will collect dust over time and/or if you operate them in warmer climate.

You can also buy the Acer AXC-603 with Pentium J2900 and 500GB HDD for $329.

And as i have said before, that system is a mini-itx case with way lower power consumption than any Haswell based Celeron/Pentium.
Not everyone cares about absolute performance per price every time, not only in PCs but everywhere else.

 

[DrMrLordX]

You let your mom buy an AIO with an E-series APU? Bad son!

My specific advice was to buy a refurb Core 2 PC from TigerDirect for around half the price, but she shied away from something that was used and may have suffered equipment failure in the past. What she wound up doing was her own decision. The unit she got is decent enough, and she won't care about the deficiency of the E1 inside it 5-10 years from now when she finally replaces it, if it lasts that long, which it probably will. Seriously, she was content with her old Netburst Celeron. The only reason she replaced that was the Windows XP deadline.

Seriously though, why not an AIO with at least an IB Pentium, or 1007U / 1037U? If you're going to spend the money to upgrade, and she holds on to her machines that long, don't you think that if the CPU is marginally faster than what she had before, then in five years time, it will be REALLY slow, in comparison to current rigs five years from now. Why put her intentionally behind the 8-ball, so to speak?

For her usage patterns, the CPU was rarely the bottleneck on her system. The worst thing about her old machine was the tiny amount of RAM (and all the swapping it had to do to compensate). It was terrible. Given the modern shift towards mobile computing, RAM requirements for "light" computing may not go up as quickly as they did in the 90s/early aughts, so 4 gigs should hold her longer than did the 512mb on her old machine. Furthermore, good luck finding something other than an E-series chip within the price range acceptable to her. I'm surprised she spent as much as she did. Sadly, she could have gotten a faster E-series chip in a Lenovo unit that was sold out at the Office Depot where she decided to buy (why, I don't know, but that's another story).

Listen to yourself, seemingly defending this practice. It's like selling watered-down milk.

Whether or not I like it is irrelevant. Put yourself in the shoes of the OEM, and look at the average non-enthusiast buyer who is not a power user. Then you can begin to understand why they would pay an estimated extra $30 to use this CPU over something that might have more computing power. Unlike selling watered-down milk, at least the informed consumer can look up the J2900 and see it for what it really is. Can you detect extra water in an opaque, sealed milk container? I can't.

No, but market forces should ensure that. That is, if we had a healthy, demand-based market.

Demand for what? The desktop market is taking a nosedive, due in large part to the fact that many people already have a "good enough" desktop or that they are moving to laptops and/or tablets. Anyone buying a new desktop is either going to be a power user that needs more than what can be had in a mobile package plus more than what could be had from a top-end PC 2-4 years ago or some fuddy-duddy that can't be bothered with mobility in their computing.

When it comes to sub-$500 machines, the power user is immediately off the list of potential buyers. What remains are an odd hodgepodge of people who aren't buying iPads or laptops but need to replace a desktop (I suspect there are very few new entrants to the market) and don't want to buy used/refurb. On the x86 desktop front, desktop "bloat" slowed down after the Vista fiasco, which was a major shot across the bow of Microsoft showing that they can't just assume that all users will keep upgrading hardware to keep up with the processor/memory/video card demands of an operating system, much less its supported applications (and I'm sure other software vendors took heed of this). Certain computing paradigms continue to require stronger and stronger hardware at the pace of Moore's Law (gaming, HPC, etc), but general use just isn't becoming that much more demanding. The Flash-bloated nonsense you see on a lot of web pages is about as bad as it was in, say, 2006-2008. If your machine can handle that, it can handle just about any light computing task. And, let's be honest, grandma isn't watching hi-res embedded video; she's watching it in low-bandwidth mode, if at all.

How is the market not demand-based? It's not like the salespeople at Best Buy or Micro Center want people to buy the E1s. They're doing their best to upsell to the core series, and talk down Celerons and E-series.

The motives of retail clerks and OEMs are not always the one and the same. Retailers are ultimately responsible for carrying an inventory to at least attract, if not cater to, the customers they want in their stores. Commission-based retail sales clerks are always going to want to sell the highest-dollar item available. The store still has to fill out various price points to get warm bodies in the store, and if that's what the OEMs are shoveling up, then . . .

Bottom line is that many of us seem to think that end-users buying cheap OEM machines really care that yesterday's mid-range should be today's low-end, just because of Moore's Law and basic economic theory. They don't, and OEMs certainly don't. This is why you see mobile chips showing up in cheapie desktops/AiOs. Margins improve for the OEM, and the end user gets something that is good enough for them. Many of them also don't care about SSDs vs 5400 rpm platter drives. OEMs aren't going to make any extra money by having the fastest, lowest-margin machine at the $400 price point, especially since desktops aren't a "trend" item anyway.

 

[pw257008]

The motives of retail clerks and OEMs are not always the one and the same. Retailers are ultimately responsible for carrying an inventory to at least attract, if not cater to, the customers they want in their stores. Commission-based retail sales clerks are always going to want to sell the highest-dollar item available. The store still has to fill out various price points to get warm bodies in the store, and if that's what the OEMs are shoveling up, then . . .

Bottom line is that many of us seem to think that end-users buying cheap OEM machines really care that yesterday's mid-range should be today's low-end, just because of Moore's Law and basic economic theory. They don't, and OEMs certainly don't. This is why you see mobile chips showing up in cheapie desktops/AiOs. Margins improve for the OEM, and the end user gets something that is good enough for them. Many of them also don't care about SSDs vs 5400 rpm platter drives. OEMs aren't going to make any extra money by having the fastest, lowest-margin machine at the $400 price point, especially since desktops aren't a "trend" item anyway.

I'm with you on that. I'm just saying people asking for help from salespeople aren't being tricked into netbook processors, so I'm not sure how this market is not adequately demand-based. Sure, it's not perfectly competitive, but we're not talking grain sales here. If someone wants the cheapest computer out there, and the cheapest computer uses a netbook processor, and they buy a netbook processor, and this encourages OEMs earning a larger margin on these netbooks in desktop form to sell more E1 towers, the market seems very demand-driven. I'm not defending the OEMs or the consumers, I'm just saying, this is pretty much how I'd expect a market to function given consumer behavior at the low end.

 

[DrMrLordX]

Well yes, that is in essence what I was saying. OEMs get their margins up and the end-user gets something that's "good enough", which is pretty subjective I admit. The demand for more CPU power just isn't there the way it was in the past, especially not for the low-end desktop crowd.

 

[pw257008]

yeah, I think I was trying to say, we pretty much agree, and then maybe needlessly rephrased it all

 

[crashtech]

It's just weird to think that quite a few users are going to realize that their new PC is slower than their old one. I don't think that used to happen very often.

 

[sm625]

All pentium J-class cpus are going to choke on any serious single threaded workload. Web pages will lag when loading, and especially annoyingly, when scrolling. Try doing an ebay search next time you are in front of one of these machines at best buy. The lag is atrocious. I could not recommend this to anyone considering it is brand new hardware and performance will only degrade over time, and especially when you can buy a $100 off lease core 2 duo E8xxx series machine and get a hell of a lot better overall general usage experience. Single thread performance is basically pentium 4 level.

 

[TeknoBug]

It's just weird to think that quite a few users are going to realize that their new PC is slower than their old one. I don't think that used to happen very often.

Everything seems to be going down in quality, such as DVD players, my older DVD player could handle a 3 floor drop but my new one can't even fall off the TV stand without it falling apart.

Hamburgers getting smaller and more expensive while the older hamburgers are "reintroduced" with a higher price premium at a fast food chain, etc. The market is a dirty place.

Even those old god awful eMachines are better than these low end PC's.

 

[AtenRa]

Sorry but those ATOM based Celerons/Pentiums are LOW POWER Entry level PCs, there is another segment for Entry Level PCs that cost the same or close but have higher performance and higher power consumption(Haswell Celerons/Pentiums).
People should not mix those two, they are targeting different people/needs.

 

[crashtech]

Sorry but those ATOM based Celerons/Pentiums are LOW POWER Entry level PCs, there is another segment for Entry Level PCs that cost the same or close but have higher performance and higher power consumption(Haswell Celerons/Pentiums).
People should not mix those two, they are targeting different people/needs.

Again, the link to the product the OP talks about:

http://www.futureshop.ca/en-CA/prod...63e63b9a8ecfeb75e1666b7en02&SearchPageIndex=1

It doesn't seem to be marketed the way you say.

 

[Arkaign]

Everything you can buy today runs circles around a P4HT. Even a single core Celeron G465 is as fast as a P4EE 3.73GHz. I think that says it all...

Though I agree 100% on energy efficiency. P4's where power-hogs.

No, not really.

There are still systems for sale with the AMD E1-1200 in them at the big box stores :

From geekbench 3 (newest) :

That's per-core performance, so the dual-core E1 will be a bit better (though obviously not 100% better).

Still, I build old PCs all the time for a local charity, and a 3+Ghz P4 is more than usable with modern web sites, MS Word/Outlook/Excel, etc. The E1 is as well, but MUCH more painfully. It's god-awful.

 

[Enigmoid]

No, not really.

There are still systems for sale with the AMD E1-1200 in them at the big box stores :

From geekbench 3 (newest) :

That's per-core performance, so the dual-core E1 will be a bit better (though obviously not 100% better).

Still, I build old PCs all the time for a local charity, and a 3+Ghz P4 is more than usable with modern web sites, MS Word/Outlook/Excel, etc. The E1 is as well, but MUCH more painfully. It's god-awful.

Yep, that looks bad.

It looks worse if you remove the AES components.

 

[Blue_Max]

All pentium J-class cpus are going to choke on any serious single threaded workload. Web pages will lag when loading, and especially annoyingly, when scrolling. Try doing an ebay search next time you are in front of one of these machines at best buy. The lag is atrocious.

Just wait 'til momma tries to play Farmville on it -- she'll put her fist through the screen! :twisted:

 

[VirtualLarry]

My specific advice was to buy a refurb Core 2 PC from TigerDirect for around half the price, but she shied away from something that was used and may have suffered equipment failure in the past. What she wound up doing was her own decision. The unit she got is decent enough, and she won't care about the deficiency of the E1 inside it 5-10 years from now when she finally replaces it, if it lasts that long, which it probably will. Seriously, she was content with her old Netburst Celeron. The only reason she replaced that was the Windows XP deadline.

For her usage patterns, the CPU was rarely the bottleneck on her system. The worst thing about her old machine was the tiny amount of RAM (and all the swapping it had to do to compensate). It was terrible. Given the modern shift towards mobile computing, RAM requirements for "light" computing may not go up as quickly as they did in the 90s/early aughts, so 4 gigs should hold her longer than did the 512mb on her old machine. Furthermore, good luck finding something other than an E-series chip within the price range acceptable to her. I'm surprised she spent as much as she did. Sadly, she could have gotten a faster E-series chip in a Lenovo unit that was sold out at the Office Depot where she decided to buy (why, I don't know, but that's another story).

Her old system was actually swapping when it ran? See, I attribute people like that (that put up with severe performance deficiencies) to simply being ignorant (not a put down) of what's available that's higher performance. They just get used to the lack of performance, and think all PCs are that slow. (It doesn't help sales that the display models of PCs at BestBuy are loaded down with crapware either, masking the performance increases of the hardware.) That, or I guess, they just don't have the budget for performance. Still, you could probably throw together a Haswell Celeron / Pentium rig with SSD for under $400. Although, that wouldn't include the screen.

Unlike selling watered-down milk, at least the informed consumer can look up the J2900 and see it for what it really is. Can you detect extra water in an opaque, sealed milk container? I can't.

Ok, maybe it's more akin to "light" OJ. 50% less calories, because it's watered down, and only 50% juice. Kind of how the Atoms are now branded Celeron and Pentium, just like it's still branded "OJ", but you don't know the details, unless you look real closely at the CPU's actual model number. To top it off, "light" OJ isn't 50% of the price of regular OJ, just like Atoms aren't 50% of the cost of Core Celerons and Pentiums.

 

[DrMrLordX]

Her old system was actually swapping when it ran? See, I attribute people like that (that put up with severe performance deficiencies) to simply being ignorant (not a put down) of what's available that's higher performance. They just get used to the lack of performance, and think all PCs are that slow. (It doesn't help sales that the display models of PCs at BestBuy are loaded down with crapware either, masking the performance increases of the hardware.) That, or I guess, they just don't have the budget for performance. Still, you could probably throw together a Haswell Celeron / Pentium rig with SSD for under $400. Although, that wouldn't include the screen.

She's seen faster computers before . . . I just don't think she cares much. I did "optimize" both her machines (the old one when she had it, and the new one she has now) by removing OEM crapware, so that helped/helps some.

Ok, maybe it's more akin to "light" OJ. 50% less calories, because it's watered down, and only 50% juice. Kind of how the Atoms are now branded Celeron and Pentium, just like it's still branded "OJ", but you don't know the details, unless you look real closely at the CPU's actual model number. To top it off, "light" OJ isn't 50% of the price of regular OJ, just like Atoms aren't 50% of the cost of Core Celerons and Pentiums.

Yeah, that's a better analogy. You can read the label/ingredients and figure out what's going on with the product.

 

[Abwx]

No, not really.

There are still systems for sale with the AMD E1-1200 in them at the big box stores :

From geekbench 3 (newest) :

That's per-core performance, so the dual-core E1 will be a bit better (though obviously not 100% better).

Still, I build old PCs all the time for a local charity, and a 3+Ghz P4 is more than usable with modern web sites, MS Word/Outlook/Excel, etc. The E1 is as well, but MUCH more painfully. It's god-awful.

What is god awful is a bench that yield the same score for
a processor when running it at 1ghz and 1.48ghz.

Seriously.?.

 

[TreVader]

Haswell Celeron is an order of magnitude faster and nearly as cheap.

 

[crashtech]

Well, an order of magnitude would be ten times as fast, I don't think the evidence supports that. Double the ST performance, sure.

 

[jpiniero]

All pentium J-class cpus are going to choke on any serious single threaded workload. Web pages will lag when loading, and especially annoyingly, when scrolling. Try doing an ebay search next time you are in front of one of these machines at best buy. The lag is atrocious. I could not recommend this to anyone considering it is brand new hardware and performance will only degrade over time, and especially when you can buy a $100 off lease core 2 duo E8xxx series machine and get a hell of a lot better overall general usage experience. Single thread performance is basically pentium 4 level.

I think you are underestimating the performance these days, especially when browsers have gotten so much faster. Hell, I just ran Sunspider on my laptop and got 740 ms running Firefox 3.6.1.

 

[Homeles]

What is god awful is a bench that yield the same score for
a processor when running it at 1ghz and 1.48ghz.

Seriously.?.

You were pushing Geekbench back when Silvermont performance rumors were surfacing. Funny how the story changes when the tables are turned.