Pentium 4 vs. Celeron- which one is better?

[HiTech]

Got me two 'puters for free and unit A has a P4 2GHz w/ 512 L2 cache/ 400MHz FSM and hyperthreading. Unit B has a Celeron 2.4Ghz / 512 L2 cache/ 400FSM. Now from what I've read the Pentiums outshined the Celerons due to their higher L2 cache and buffering, otherwise the top shelf Celerons architecture is quite the same as the Pentium's. I could use an extra 'puter for testing software and maybe as a game server. I'm leaning towards the P4 but that faster Celeron has be wondering about its potential. I've seen some pretty slick running PCs with higher end Celerons in them running some demanding games with ease. What do you think? Be factual and not subjective.

 

[audioguru]

2GHz and 2.4GHz processors are pretty old. My computer is an old antique that is about 2.5 years old and it is a Pentium4 2.93GHz that I bought brand new for nearly nothing.
Today its value is almost zero but it works perfectly.

 

[blueroomelectronics]

I'd take the hyperthreading P4 over the non hypertherading one.

 

[audioguru]

My 2.93GHz P4 was made about when hyperthreading was introduced. Some sites say my processor has it and other sites says it doesn't. Who cares because it works fine.

I don't think the older processors mentioned have hyperthreading.

 

[rjvh]

You've them both anyway so why not test it out

my computer at home is a P4 celeron 1.7 GHzzzzzzz and does all the things do on it OK (i am not a gamer)

my work laptop is a duo core 2GHz and what i do on it is done as quick as that my computer it does at home (exept uploading drawings in auto CAD, laptop is a bit quicker)

A friend of my has a quadcore and developt web software and he say it's worth for him to have one for testing but otherwise if you see the difference in for example EXEL

0.00002 sec for one switch or 0.00003 for a switch in the program

it depents more wat you want to do with it

Robert-Jan

 

[audioguru]

I have a computer test program. It measures the time for the computer to calculate the value of pi to many decimal places. My old 486 pc took much longer than my P4.

 

[gramo]

Could you send me the program, just interested in running it myself

 

[picbits]

I've just bought a P4 2.8Ghz Dell with a 17" LCD monitor for £80 ($160) off Ebay. Its good enough for the kids to bum around on and frees up the newer machine to "retire" as a Ubuntu Server running a MythTv backend with 1Tb storage.

 

[phalanx]

The P4 with hyperthreading would be my choice.

 

[blueroomelectronics]

My 2.93GHz P4 was made about when hyperthreading was introduced. Some sites say my processor has it and other sites says it doesn't. Who cares because it works fine.

I don't think the older processors mentioned have hyperthreading.

Control-alt-delete will show two CPUs if you have hyperthreading.
**broken link removed**

 

[HiTech]

2GHz and 2.4GHz processors are pretty old. My computer is an old antique that is about 2.5 years old and it is a Pentium4 2.93GHz that I bought brand new for nearly nothing.
Today its value is almost zero but it works perfectly.

The P4 is considered a respectable processor, still worthy of being put to many uses. Yes, it is seeing its eventual demise with all the other newer processors on the market, but it does hold its own! It's a very stable processor and interfaced with XP Pro makes for a very stable computing platform, compared to a hot running dual core and Vista's nonsense. I have sold used P4 systems for $150 U.S. with ease -- that's a lot more than "almost zero"! If you look closer at Intel and AMD, you will see that a good many of their current processors are in the range of 2.2GHz to 2.8GHz and when you enter the 3GHz and up, prices change considerably... and then drastically for the Extreme processors!

 

[audioguru]

Boo hoo (crying),
My Penium4 2.93GHz processor does not have hyperthreading.

Hi Gramo,
I can't attach my program here.
Look for Super Pi in Google. My pc does 2M in 1 minute, 43 seconds. I have only 512M of RAM.

 

[picbits]

1 minute 53 seconds on my cheapo 1.73 Ghz Intel Celeron Laptop with 2Gb Ram and Vista for 2 million whatevers

 

[dknguyen]

Control-alt-delete will show two CPUs if you have hyperthreading.
**broken link removed**

What on earth? HOw come I never noticed that there were two CPU process Windows for my Core 2 Duo until now?

 

[blueroomelectronics]

I think the Quad core and Duo with hyperthreading show 4 CPUs. (I've not tested it I only have a 3GHz hyperthreading P4)

 

[UTMonkey]

Just my twopenneth but if all you are going to do is surf\wordprocess\electronics stuff either are fine.

Layer 2 cache is very important - but not as important as layer 1 cache, I believe that is one of the significant differences in the chip.

From what you say they both have the same FSB so both should throw RAM in and out of the chip very well. But it is the caching the counts.

Regards

Photoshop or 3D Studio - go for the P4
Mail\Wordprocessing\(Solitaire?) - go for celeron.

 

[UTMonkey]

Just out of interest do the motherboards have on board VGA? if so is it shared RAM?

 

[Torben]

Just for giggles I wanted to see what a relatively modern laptop would get on the test. My laptop runs 1 million digits of pi in 17.5 seconds under Linux. I also ran the Windows version under wine and got 25.5 seconds. That's using one core of a 2.2GHz Core 2 Duo w/2GB RAM. I hear there's a multicore version of the test available but I haven't hunted it down yet.

Back on-topic, I'd probably go with the P4 unless I was able to test the machines for the tasks I wanted to use it for.


Torben

 

[zanes]

My AMD 1900XP+ I picked up at the start of the academic year is fine as a Linux box, even with ubuntu installed.

 

[Optikon]

So how is super Pi a real test of computing power?

Isnt the real performance result VERY dependent on operating system and how it handles multiple threads and utilizes the cache?

Super pi seems cute but are you fooling yourself?