bozack:
To start things off, Im going to tell you that I own an Intel system, a P3-600@800, and Im very satisfied and it's definitely the best Intel product I ever bought. Ok, lets get to it.
<<real world is that no one will even notice a difference between a 700 duron and a 700 celeron unless they pay really close attention to their computer or they are a bunch of dorks and base everything on synthetic benchmarks as the article said.
True, synthetic numbers dont mean anything, but where have you been the past two months? Almost every Duron review on the internet experienced a great advantage over the Celeron in real world situations. What Maximum PC is trying to tell us is not linear with whatever a majority of the people are experiencing, that is very odd.
<<The duron may be a better performer than the celeron, and they may have used a crappy vid card-but really do you all care? are you all so proud of your amd setups that it offends you a magazine says the intel chip is almost as good, or that most won't notice the performance difference? if so that is pretty sad.>>
Haha... that is funny my friend. Like I said I own Intel, and Im saying they're BSing because they ARE. I never owned an AMD so Im not proud of it, Im just very unhappy about they way they handle situations like this, Maximum PC just dont have the capacity to admitting Intel has lost the low-end battle. Are you are going to deny the Duron being a faster and better CPU "because people most likely wont notice it?", oh lord, that is some bullsh1t. Are you trying to tell me that the ass-kicked Celeron costing twice as much as a Duron can be "almost as good"? Oh my, that is sad.
<<And to support their argument take a visit to the hot deals forums and looks at how many people are picking up 633 celeron 2's that are doing 950mhz easily with stock cooling and a crappy intel fan setup at default voltage? if that isnt easy overclocking on outdated bx boards then I don't know what is>>
And to support my argument I want you to see this,
SharkyExtreme Weekly CPU Prices - Intel and
AMD Prices. What a big mess, I cant afford to see it anymore. How sad, that huge disaster there at the low end. If you think using a KT7-RAID which can adjust the Duron multiplierand hit 900-1000MHz with little or no effort is not easy, then I dont know what is. Not to mention when a Duron is overclocked to 900-1000MHz, it actually performs like a real 900-1000MHz(Tbird). Unlike those Celerons, even overclocked to 850-900 they only perform like a 650MHz(P3).
<<most average people would never know or be able to tell the difference between a c2 and duron at the same or equivalent speeds-they only use their systems for inet surfing or home finance, hate to break it but you dont need a 700mhz cpu for home finance >>
Again, that is just what you think, I do believe many people will be able to feel a noticable different from using a Duron to a Celeron, most noticable in games. Think about it, a 700MHz non overclocked Duron can still beat the highly overclocked Celeron, costing 30-50% less, and its also highly overclockable. This argument is meaningless as you can use all your impractical reasons against AMD. I do agree however, that if somebody with BX looking for an upgrade, Celeron will be their best bet. And true enough, no casual users will need a 700MHz, but can we say that AMD still has the lowest price despite being so much faster? A Celeron 366 is $63(cheapest Intel CPU), and a Duron 600 is $51. You get the point, people dont need 700MHz, but a 600MHz with a price tag of $51 isn't too bad either now is it? Now can an Intel CPU do that? Didn't think so. The fact is Durons have some unbeatable prices for those who looks to build a value system. The Duron is the price/performance king at the low end and Maximum PC missed the point by a mile.