PIII vs P4 for similar CPU pricing

[Kartman]

I'm trying to determine why potential buyer building a new PC or replacing the guts of an existing PC would chose the PIII over the P4 for a similar price point. While browsing some of the online vendors I found the following:

MWAVE.com:
PIII FC-PGA, 1200MHz Retail is $262, 1266MHz Retail is $269
P4 1.8MHz Retail is $244

Somehow, I don't think this is an isolated case and wonder what the benefits are from going the PIII route instead of the P4. Would it be a safe position to warrant the PIII is more commonly used for traditional Win9x operating environments and the P4 better suited for 2000/XP? Somehow I doubt a PIII performance characteristics would out-perform the P4 in the above scenario.

Thoughts?

 

[DClark]

The Tualatin P3s are way overpriced because when they were introduced, they were almost as fast or faster than the fastest P4s (then around 1.5 or 1.6Ghz) in many applications. Now they've marketted P3s for the server market.

What you want to look at is the Tualatin Celeron. It's 1.2Ghz and is essentially a P3 on a 100mhz fsb (256kb of L2 cache and data prefetch logic, same as the tualatin P3), and only costs around $125usd.

Tom's Hardware has a couple articles on the new Celeron and its' competition (the 1.1 and 1.2Ghz Durons):
http://www6.tomshardware.com/cpu/01q4/011116/index.html
http://www6.tomshardware.com/cpu/01q4/011003/index.html

The thing I found surprising is that the Celeron is given PC100 ram for the first article, and I think the memory may have been running on a 100mhz fsb in the second article as well. I know that I can set my memory speed to 133mhz even if I'm running the processor on a 100mhz fsb, so it's a little suprising to see them stick with a linear 100mhz across the board. The Duron was given DDR SDRAM to run in both articles (which also puzzles me a bit, as even though the P3s and Celerons don't gain as much on a DDR platform than the AMD processors, they still bench better with DDR memory.

 

[The_Lurker]

<< Somehow, I don't think this is an isolated case and wonder what the benefits are from going the PIII route instead of the P4. Would it be a safe position to warrant the PIII is more commonly used for traditional Win9x operating environments and the P4 better suited for 2000/XP? Somehow I doubt a PIII performance characteristics would out-perform the P4 in the above scenario.

Thoughts? >>



The assumtion is totally unwarranted. The PIII does not perform better in Win 9x than Win 2000/XP. It will perform the same across those os's, the same as the P4 would. The P3 will perform around the same (because of the dif architecture) as the P4 clock to clock. IN this case, the P3 will stil perform well up to par w/ the P4 only in certain applications that dont rely heavily on bandwidth (Rambus anyone?). At this point though, you should probably go w/ the P4 since the Tualitin was released for no apparent reason. The board didn't support any newer CPU (only the tualitins) and the P3 Tualitins were limited to below 1.2ghz i think. So go w/ the P4, u'll be happier with it, and you can always upgrade w/ it, whereas the P3, u can't.


Edit: Typo

 

[Kartman]

<<

<< Somehow, I don't think this is an isolated case and wonder what the benefits are from going the PIII route instead of the P4. Would it be a safe position to warrant the PIII is more commonly used for traditional Win9x operating environments and the P4 better suited for 2000/XP? Somehow I doubt a PIII performance characteristics would out-perform the P4 in the above scenario.
Thoughts? >>


Go go w/ the P4, u'll be happier with it, and you can always upgrade w/ it, whereas the P4, u can't. >>



I think you are negating your own recommendation, are you?

 

[MadRat]

Intel ought to be offering 133fsb versions of their new Celerons. Its a load of nonsense that they cost so much for the pitiful performance restrictions. I could see the high prices if they actually met P4 performance.

 

[Kartman]

<< Intel ought to be offering 133fsb versions of their new Celerons. Its a load of nonsense that they cost so much for the pitiful performance restrictions. I could see the high prices if they actually met P4 performance. >>



They do, its the 1.2GHz Celeron on the 0.13 process.

 

[DClark]

The 1.2Ghz Celeron is running on a 100mhz fsb; the 1.2Ghz P3 runs on a 133mhz fsb.

I actually don't mind that the Celeron is still on a 100mhz fsb (so long at it can overclock to 133mhz ). Macci has overclocked his Celeron from 1.2 Ghz to as high as 1.83Ghz, and the performance is stunning. I saw his SiSoft Sandra benches with the Celeron overclocked to 1.78Ghz, and his scores were 5009 MIPS and 2388 MFLOPS in the Sandra CPU benchmark (for comparison, the reference Athlon 4 @1.33Ghz scored 3750 and 1848 marks respectively), and in the CPU Multimedia Benchmark he scored 9707 it/s for Integer SSE, and 12050 it/s for the Floating-Point SSE (the 1.33Ghz Athlon 4 reference system scored 7388 and 8479 it/s respectively).

Those are with pretty extreme overclocking procedures though, but it's nice to see a Celeron clocking at over 1.8GHz