Is a Celeron really that bad?

UDT89

Diamond Member
Jul 31, 2001
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I was asked to find a laptop for my soon to be brother in law who graduated WVU this past week. The budget is very small, $300, and its tough not trying to get the best but at that price point my hands are tied. He will mostly use it for watching movies, itunes, music, internet, etc. Nothing crazy.

My local Microcenter has a Toshiba for $279 that is a celeron with ddr3.....but am i wasting my time with Celeron? Or is that what it has to be because of the budget? Oh i wish it had hdmi out.....but i think thats out of our range too.

Here is the link:

http://www.microcenter.com/single_pr...uct_id=0356534
 

mnewsham

Lifer
Oct 2, 2010
14,539
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Celeron's are the bottom of the bin essentially, bump up to about 350-400 level and you can get a decent laptop (C-50 or E-350 from AMD)
 

Bartman39

Elite Member | For Sale/Trade
Jul 4, 2000
8,867
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Dont under estimate the newer generation Celeron dual cores if thats what your looking at...? The T-series (3000, 3100, 3300, 3500) perform just about as good as the C2D T5XXX-T7XXX series... If its the single cores then what mnewsham said they are bottom of barrel and not worth even considering...

Bought one of those MSI A5000 laptops a little over a year ago with the T3100 cpu and its still serves her quite well for basicly what your asking for and she plays her little games and stuff so she is happy...
 

mnewsham

Lifer
Oct 2, 2010
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It is the Celeron 925 a 45nm Single core 2.3Ghz celeron with 1MB L2 cache and an 800MT/s FSB.
 

VirtualLarry

No Lifer
Aug 25, 2001
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Bought one of those MSI A5000 laptops a little over a year ago with the T3100 cpu and its still serves her quite well for basicly what your asking for and she plays her little games and stuff so she is happy...

Same here, those are/were nice little laptops. You can get an aftermarket BIOS that lets you overclock too. (See the thread on SD about them.)

But the single-core Celerons are basically garbage. Anything single-core is garbage for watching YouTube or Hulu full-screen, you need a dual-core or an AMD graphics chipset like the HD3200 or HD4200 or HD4250.
 

mnewsham

Lifer
Oct 2, 2010
14,539
428
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Same here, those are/were nice little laptops. You can get an aftermarket BIOS that lets you overclock too. (See the thread on SD about them.)

But the single-core Celerons are basically garbage. Anything single-core is garbage for watching YouTube or Hulu full-screen, you need a dual-core or an AMD graphics chipset like the HD3200 or HD4200 or HD4250.

Or an AMD fusion APU.
 

Zap

Elite Member
Oct 13, 1999
22,377
2
81
Dont under estimate the newer generation Celeron dual cores if thats what your looking at...?

There are dual core Arrandale Celerons for notebooks. Heck, Intel even lists a Sandy Bridge Celeron with dual cores for notebooks.

In any given "generation" the lowest end are Celerons and right above them are Pentiums. Does this mean Celerons are bad? Only when compared to their higher end contemporaries.

These modern dual core Celerons aren't as terrible as you'd think. I think it really improved once Intel got past Netburst, with the Core 2 family of Celerons.
 

colonel

Golden Member
Apr 22, 2001
1,777
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single core Celeron sucks big time, I will go AMD o Dual Core Celeron.
 

frowertr

Golden Member
Apr 17, 2010
1,372
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Basically what everyone said is valid. Single core "Celery" sticks suck ass...
 

DaveSimmons

Elite Member
Aug 12, 2001
40,730
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A single-core 2.3 GHz Celeron is still going to be faster than an Atom, even a dual-core one. So actually you can do worse :)
 

Zap

Elite Member
Oct 13, 1999
22,377
2
81
single core Celeron sucks big time, I will go AMD o Dual Core Celeron.

Basically what everyone said is valid. Single core "Celery" sticks suck ass...

Good thing all new Celerons (so far) are dual cores. Last single core desktop Celeron was 65nm Conroe/Allendale based. Since then all desktop Celerons have been dual core.