P3 500 to a Celeron d 325?

[kingtas]

I have a P3 500MHz with a PC100 Bus. It does what I need it to do. I surf the web, Office Apps (Access & VBA), light gaming, and light VB.Net 2003 coding.

Would I notice an improvement in a Celeron D 325 2.53 GHz with a 533 Bus?

The only thing I'm concerned with is the P3 has a 512MB L2 cache while the Ceron has only 256MB. I would think the increased speed of the processor and bus would more than make up for the loss, and better archictecture I'm sure.

I can get a Dell with 512MB Ram and 15" Flat Panel for $319 shipped and no tax.

Should I do it and retire this old workhorse?

Thanks.

 

[RebateMonger]

Yes, you will notice a significant difference with the Celeron D. The Celeron D is a quite-decent chip. I sold off all my P3 processors a couple of years ago.

 

[Lord Evermore]

The tremendous clock speed increase along with the vastly faster memory bus (especially if you can do dual-channel) will more than make up for differences in cache size, despite the fact that clock for clock the P4 architecture is slower than P3's. As a completely unsupported guess, I'd say a CeleronD 2.53GHz would be about equal to a 2GHz or higher P3, if such a thing existed. More cache does help, but when you're talking about such large speed differences it is overshadowed.

Web pages will load faster even though your Internet connection isn't any faster, simply because the browser can render it faster, which is especially an issue with the Flash- and Javascript-heavy sites these days. Office stuff will be snappier, load times ought to be a bit better, although much of that depends on the hard drive you'll probably also end up with a much faster hard drive too (density increases result in higher throughput, even if it's the same RPM and you'll certainly get a faster drive controller). I don't know about the VB coding performance, that'll at least see similar snappy response from the interface.

For 319 bucks it's hard to go wrong when you're upgrading from such a slow machine. And I pity you if you're using WinXP on that machine. (Note that you may want to turn off a lot of the new GUI things in XP in order to regain some performance which gets lost because of it, if you aren't already aware of that. It sucks to find out that a portion of your great fast new CPU is being sucked up just displaying pretty window borders.)

 

[Lord Evermore]

Originally posted by: RebateMonger
Yes, you will notice a significant difference with the Celeron D, even with only 256MB of RAM. But why restrict yourself to 256MB? You can add another 512MB of RAM for around $30-$50 if you look.

I think he meant 256KB L2 cache, but maybe he did mean RAM.

Certainly you don't want to go with less memory than you have now, and 256MB is a minimum amount for XP to be usable, and will result in you having to wait a lot and cancel out a lot of the clock speed improvements, although it'd still be better than a 500MHz P3.

 

[DaveSimmons]

What video card do you have now? For 3D gaming the intel motherboard graphics are crippled, check the Video tab and find the intel gma950 article a couple of pages back.

How much RAM does the Dell have? if you have 512 MB of PC100 now and move down to just 256 MB RAM you'll notice a speed drop from all the disk swapping even though the CPU is faster.

The 256K vs. 512K cache on the CPU doesn't matter, the fivefold increases in CPU speed and memory bus matter a lot more.

 

[RebateMonger]

Originally posted by: Lord Evermore
I think he meant 256KB L2 cache, but maybe he did mean RAM.

Yeah, I mis-read the original question, then caught it a minute later. Thanks.

 

[Lord Evermore]

Heck I think the cheapest video cards available now could run Windows, his applications, AND games at the same time faster than his old machine. If you could load them onto the GPU of course.

I can't imagine there's much in the way of video performance on that machine. AGP4X is the best it could be running. Even GMA950 might be higher performance. But good video cards are cheap these days, as long as the new PC actually has an upgrade slot (and even a PCI video card might be better than what he has now).

 

[kingtas]

Sorry for the confusion, guys. I did mean cache. Let me clarify things.

I have a P3 500MHz CPU with 512KB cache and 512 MB RAM

I'm thinking about a Celeron D 325 2.53 GHz with 256KB cache and 512 MB RAM. I can double the RAM to 1 Gig for an additional $50.

So I should do it?

 

[Booster]

"So I should do it?"

Keep in mind, that cheap Dell 1100 is based on the Intel 865GV chipset. No AGP slot, not PCI-E either. If you don't want to play, probably go for it.

Any AMD based PC is tons better than that Netburst crap, believe me. You will be downgrading your performance actually in some cases.

 

[kingtas]

I don't really game at all. That's why I've kept this PC for so long. The video card in it is a 16MB AGP 3DFX Voodoo 3.

Quit laughing. It does what I need it to but I saw the Dell B110 for $319 that included a 15" Flat Panel and thought that was a pretty good deal (through AAFES Online).

The sad part is that while I do what I do on the old and slow PC, my 13 Year old son is going to be getting a Conroe for Christmas.

OK, so I think I'll go ahead and upgrade. Thanks for the help.

 

[Booster]

"Quit laughing. It does what I need it to but I saw the Dell B110 for $319 that included a 15" Flat Panel and thought that was a pretty good deal (through AAFES Online)."

I wasn't. Just sharing my personal experiences with a P4 2.8 HT which I dumped. It was always very slow in Windows XP. Usable of course. That Dell deal is really sweet, b/c the FP is included. I'd go for it myself if I could get it ;-)

 

[imported_goku]

nvm

 

[bluemax]

Even GMA900 beats the pants off of Voodoo3.

The CeleronD is a screamer in comparison the the Celly500.

Do it and don't look back! Windows XP is hungirer though, so I'd recommend 1GB of RAM.

Cheap like borchst! Of course, if you're buying PARTS to upgrade your system, the PentiumD 805 is only $100 vs. $50 but is even better yet, being a full-blown Pentium4 as well as dual-core.

 

[kingtas]

Ya, I ordered a PD 805 instead. It was gonna bump the memory to a gig anyway and that would have brought the Celeron package price up to close to $400. So I decided to spend $200 more and get the PD 805. Well worth the the extra cache and two cores.

The Celeron just makes me uneasy. Thanks all.

 

[bluemax]

Originally posted by: kingtas
Ya, I ordered a PD 805 instead. It was gonna bump the memory to a gig anyway and that would have brought the Celeron package price up to close to $400. So I decided to spend $200 more and get the PD 805. Well worth the the extra cache and two cores.

The Celeron just makes me uneasy. Thanks all.

You are SO gonna' love it!

 

[kingtas]

I can't wait. I've been using this P3 500 since 99. I could get a nice Conroe system for what I paid for it. LOL.

Just wondering. What is that from?

"Keepen der mittens inder pokkets und joost vatchen der blinkenlights! "