I hate intel chips because of the low l2 caches. If i have a slow CPU with a large l2, i can be more productive than a fast cpu with a small l2.
My current machine;
Shuttle XPC SK22G2 V2
AMD ATHLON X2 64 5600+ (2.8GHz w/ 2x 1MB L2)
2GB Corsair Ballistix DDR2 RAM (w/ heatsinks)
PCI-E 16x nVIDIA GeForce 7600 GS (256 MB)
500GB SATA HD
250 watt power supply
DVD+/-RW
running Ubuntu Linux 7.1 (gusty)
Has blown any other computer i have EVER used out of the water. This thing is slick.
**broken link removed**
Anyways, to answer the op's question, i would take the 1.2GHz. I say that because it could be overclocked to be more. As other's have said, i would actually want a PIII, as they are a bit more stable (in my experience)
My laptop has a Celeron in it (1.3GHz), and it is slower than crap. But, it is a world more stable than any P4 i have ever used.
I guess my opinion is a bit biased because, being a freelance tech, i have never really had to fix computers with celerons in them, they are always P4s. They are really unstable. But, then again, people don't know how to take care of their computers.
My last computer job (P4 btw....
), a squirrel got between the client's transformer, which caused a HV surge trough the house, and blew out the PSU in the computer. So, i got it home (thinking that the whole computer would quite possibly be shot, so i started to prepare for hard drive data recovery), and popped open the case. OMG!!!!!! I wish i would have taken pictures! They had dogs in the house... There was about 6 inches of dog hair (not an exaggeration) on just about every component, including the CPU heatsink!
ok. i have done enough babbling for now.