First post, by BSA Starfire
- Rank
- Oldbie
Hi folks,
I've been wondering about Intel's budget range of CPU's the Celeron over the last few days and the many, many different types of this CPU over the years. Of course it was always a cut down version of a more powerful intel architecture, but at least one version, the "Mendocino" was perhaps better than it's original sibling, having a smaller but core speed cache.
I have a small amount of experience with the Celeron CPU's, I have never owned or used a "covington" but I know of it by reputation,is it as awful as reviews of the time indicated?
The only "Mendocino" I have is a socket 370 466MHz part, that is installed in a ASUS CUSL2 (intel 815) and performs very well indeed, much better than the PII 450 on BX I had years ago. I do have a few "Coppermine" celly's, 600MHz & 1000Mhz, but they seem to be really outclassed by a "real" PIII coppermine(however I suspect they out gun the PII & PIII "kalmath" CPU's).
The "Tualatin" is an core I have not used at all, I do have a 1200 MHz Celeron "tualatin" but no board to use it in. I expect this is perhaps as good as a PIII "coppermine" would be had they worked at that frequency?
OK onto the "netburst" Celerons, as far as I know the "willamette" with 128K cache was a dreadful chip, the "northwood" 128 was a great overclocker but woefully slow at stock speed and easily beaten by the cheaper Athlon XP.
The Celeron D was a big improvement, 256K cache and 533 FSB brought it into a usable CPU(I still use a skt 478 Celeron D 2.4GHz as a media player system), heat was always the problem with "prescott" however, it does run cooler that prescott P4 however. The final "netburst" Celeron was the "cedarmill", this in it's later steppings was a fast and cool running CPU with a 512K cache, but by then core2 was on the market...........
As far as I am aware that was the last gasp for "netburst", all Intel CPU's were based on the CORE2 from then on, Celeron's first foray here was a single core version of 800 FSB core 2's, I imagine this chip would have been a good buy at the time(not much multi threaded software, and cool running), Later came dual core variants also on 800 FSB with 512K cache(I use a E1400 in my "micro" server,it's a great little chip and runs really cool).
Beyond this point I know nothing about the newer Celerons but imagine they follow a similar pattern to the CORE2 derived versions.
Be really interested to hear who uses the Celeron today(considering it is probably no cheaper than "full fat" versions), thoughts on the various CPU cores, and why you'd use a vintage Celeron today? Is it nostalgia, overclocking ability, a real advantage over the more expensive"full fat" versions?
Best regards,
Chris
286 20MHz,1MB RAM,Trident 8900B 1MB, Conner CFA-170A.SB 1350B
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