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#1
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Is a Celeron OK for me?
Hello
I'm a part time IT student (studying to be a programmer) and I'm trying to start up an IT business (as well as working full time). I'm currently using a Pentium 2-350 with 448 mb PC-100 SDRAM and an ATI Radeon 64mb video card with a SoundBlaster 64 card. I'm using ColdFusion MX to develop a sample web application with. Will a Celeron make a big enough difference or should I look at Pentium 4? I've looked at prices of AMD but I'm concerned about not being able to upgrade to a Pentium if I get an AMD machine. I was thinking of maybe getting a Celeron for now and upgrading it to a Pentium 4 later on. Thanks Peter Mount |
#2
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Peter Mount wrote:
I'm currently using a Pentium 2-350 with 448 mb PC-100 SDRAM and an ATI Radeon 64mb video card with a SoundBlaster 64 card. I'm using ColdFusion MX to develop a sample web application with. Will a Celeron make a big enough difference or should I look at Pentium 4? I've looked at prices of AMD but I'm concerned about not being able to upgrade to a Pentium if I get an AMD machine. That is true. If you get an AMD machine, you will not be able to upgrade to a Pentium without switching out the motherboard. Though I'm not sure why that ability would be a priority for you. The P4 based Celerons are never, ever a good buy. Add the price of your P4 motherboard, Celeron CPU, and P4 "upgrade" CPU, and compare that to an AMD board + CPU (which would be fast *right now*). The latest "D" models are the first P4-based Celerons with performance that isn't embarrassing. http://anandtech.com/cpu/showdoc.html?i=2093&p=6 But even then, they're outperformed by an AMD chip that costs half as much. All this Celeron bashing aside, let it be known that I do own a Celeron 2.0 GHz machine. The system it was used for is a dedicated MythTV machine. I knew I wanted an Asus Pundit for the box (cheap, small, quiet). The Pundit is P4-based, but since I was using a hardware MPEG2 encoder, I didn't need much CPU power. So I went with the Celeron. (Cheapest chip for a P4 motherboard). Yes, the performance is pretty poor, but the application doesn't require anything better. If you are locked into having a P4 system for whatever reason, then the Celeron may prove to be acceptable, depending on what you plan to do with the system. For developing a web application, sure, it's OK. But you can do better. -WD |
#3
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If you really are an IT student, shame on you for thoughtlessly
swallowing Intel's marketing pitch about "superiority" of Pentium (I presume it to be P4) architecture. You should 've known better that even Intel admitted it to be dead end technology by deciding to drop future development of this line. Or shame on your school for feeding their students these marketing gimmicks. This, in part, explains the difficulties AMD has in penetrating corporate market, even though, at least at times, AMD products are clearly superior. If your main concern is upgradeability, you should go with AMD socket 940 or 939. If we believe Hector Ruiz (and he must be informed since he's the CEO), these sockets will receive dual core processors next year. Neither current Intel socket 478, nor AMD socket 462 (older K7 architecture) are getting it. As for the upcoming Intel socket 775, you will pay an arm and a leg for the board, not mentioning matching video card and RAM, and there's no Celeron for that socket yet, you'd have to get full-fledged P4, and the highest end one at that, priced accordingly. If you want good performance on a cheap right now (but with not much of an upgrade path), you should go with Athlon XP. Priced at (or even below) Celery level, but performs, for most apps, just as well as P4. Or even, if you are ready to pay P4-level price, get yourself Athlon64 (non-FX). Beats equally priced P4 in most apps, and you can upgrade the software to 64 bit later this year - try this with Intel. Finally, if your goal is to save a buck, just get yourself a P3 and stick it in your existing board (you may need Slot1 to Socket370 adaptor, but it's cheap). A quick Pricewatch check shows $39 for p3-750, and it will be quite adequate for your development needs. I did recently some ASP.NET development on client's site, and the P3-550 they supplied, while sluggish, was good enough to do the job. I would be surprised if ColdFusion needed more resources than .NET. On Sat, 3 Jul 2004 21:41:29 +1000, "Peter Mount" wrote: Hello I'm a part time IT student (studying to be a programmer) and I'm trying to start up an IT business (as well as working full time). I'm currently using a Pentium 2-350 with 448 mb PC-100 SDRAM and an ATI Radeon 64mb video card with a SoundBlaster 64 card. I'm using ColdFusion MX to develop a sample web application with. Will a Celeron make a big enough difference or should I look at Pentium 4? I've looked at prices of AMD but I'm concerned about not being able to upgrade to a Pentium if I get an AMD machine. I was thinking of maybe getting a Celeron for now and upgrading it to a Pentium 4 later on. Thanks Peter Mount |
#4
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PM I found a local computer shop has something called
"Transmeta" though I have no idea what they are like. http://www.vanshardware.com/ has a review of the recent "efficeon". Learn about "thermal throttling" :-) http://www.vanshardware.com/reviews/2004/04/040405_efficeon/040405_efficeon.htm Alan ... the current upgrade path for 32bit AMD is completely dead. ... With a celeron you could upgrade later to a P4 depending on the motherboard. But you'd still have the old (slow) RAM, and old (slow) graphics. For someone planning to swap the CPU later this year, planning for Parts-is-Parts upgrade might make sense. I always consider PiP at upgrade time, but since I upgrade every 3 years or so, it's always the case that too much has changed, and I build a whole new PC (and trickle-down the old one). Anyone buying an economy PC today, with plans to upgrade it in 18 months, is apt to be facing then: - DDR2 (and faster DDR2) - PCI Express graphics - 64-bit Unless you have recent experience with upgrade-in-place, and a definite component plan, just buy whatever does the job for the least dollars. That might be a remaindered Duron, or low-end Athlon, or last year's P4 from your neighborhood hardware enthusiast, or even a Celeron (suitably priced, of course). The Microtel PCs sold web-only by SamsClub are often an attractive deal. I used a bare-bones one to help a neighbor rebuild after a lightning strike fried just enough of his motherboard to make the PC unusable. -- Regards, Bob Niland http://www.access-one.com/rjn email4rjn AT yahoo DOT com NOT speaking for any employer, client or Internet Service Provider. |
#5
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Peter Mount wrote:
I'm currently using a Pentium 2-350 with 448 mb PC-100 SDRAM and an ATI Radeon 64mb video card with a SoundBlaster 64 card. I'm using ColdFusion MX to develop a sample web application with. Will a Celeron make a big enough difference or should I look at Pentium 4? I've looked at prices of AMD but I'm concerned about not being able to upgrade to a Pentium if I get an AMD machine. I was thinking of maybe getting a Celeron for now and upgrading it to a Pentium 4 later on. If upgradeability is the priority, then you shouldn't even consider Intel. In the past four years, Intel has had three different socket formats the Pentium 4/Celeron line, whereas AMD has kept steady with a single format for Athlon XP/Duron line.You could have conceivably started with a 700Mhz Duron about 4 years ago and upgraded it to a 3200+ Athlon XP today using the same motherboard. (Mind you a motherboard from four years ago, may not have had all of the voltages and front-side bus speeds needed for the latest Athlon XPs, but socket format has stayed exactly the same since then.) Intel started with Socket 428, then it migrated to Socket 472, and now it's got Socket 775 all for different sub-generations of the Pentium 4. As you can see, upgradeability is not part of the Intel equation. In fact, the whole Pentium 4 line is now coming to an end, Intel has decided that the current Pentium 4 sub-generation is going to be its last Pentium 4 sub-generation. It is now going to migrate to a core that is derived off of its older Pentium 3 line again. AMD is also undergoing a major generation change, it's old Athlon XPs are going to be retired to make way for the Athlon 64 line. This does use totally different motherboards from the old XPs. But as you can see, the track record for AMD architecture stability is higher than Intel's in recent years. It's likely that AMD will maintain stability within its newest generations on a par with its older Athlon XP generations. Yousuf Khan |
#6
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On Mon, 05 Jul 2004 14:41:02 GMT, "Yousuf Khan"
wrote: Peter Mount wrote: I'm currently using a Pentium 2-350 with 448 mb PC-100 SDRAM and an ATI Radeon 64mb video card with a SoundBlaster 64 card. I'm using ColdFusion MX to develop a sample web application with. Will a Celeron make a big enough difference or should I look at Pentium 4? I've looked at prices of AMD but I'm concerned about not being able to upgrade to a Pentium if I get an AMD machine. I was thinking of maybe getting a Celeron for now and upgrading it to a Pentium 4 later on. If upgradeability is the priority, then you shouldn't even consider Intel. In the past four years, Intel has had three different socket formats the Pentium 4/Celeron line, whereas AMD has kept steady with a single format for Athlon XP/Duron line.You could have conceivably started with a 700Mhz Duron about 4 years ago and upgraded it to a 3200+ Athlon XP today using the same motherboard. (Mind you a motherboard from four years ago, may not have had all of the voltages and front-side bus speeds needed for the latest Athlon XPs, but socket format has stayed exactly the same since then.) I can assure you that a 4 year old Socket A motherboard would absolutely NOT support an AthlonXP 3200+, even if the socket is the same. Heck, my two year old board (that recently committed suicide) was not capable of handling such chips, it was limited to 266MT/s bus speeds. Only socket A boards built in about the last year have been able to handle the latest and greatest chips. Long story short, you're screwed when it comes to upgradability no matter who you chose. No matter what motherboard you buy now you're upgrades are going to be VERY limited, no matter how much sockets may change. Buying a system now with plans for upgrades more than 6 months in the future is a sure fire way to waste your money! ------------- Tony Hill hilla underscore 20 at yahoo dot ca |
#7
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Tony Hill wrote:
I can assure you that a 4 year old Socket A motherboard would absolutely NOT support an AthlonXP 3200+, even if the socket is the same. Heck, my two year old board (that recently committed suicide) was not capable of handling such chips, it was limited to 266MT/s bus speeds. Only socket A boards built in about the last year have been able to handle the latest and greatest chips. Long story short, you're screwed when it comes to upgradability no matter who you chose. No matter what motherboard you buy now you're upgrades are going to be VERY limited, no matter how much sockets may change. Buying a system now with plans for upgrades more than 6 months in the future is a sure fire way to waste your money! Well, regardless about the finer details of the Socket A platform, it looks like AMD is going to keep it around for a couple years at least. Looks like Sempron is going to be extending its life some more. Yousuf Khan |
#8
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(Nate Edel) wrote :
For developing web applications, a Tualatin-compatible Slotket and a Tualatin Celeron 1.4ghz would probably be the cheapest option, and offer quite acceptable performance. cheap tualatin ? are you kidding ? they go 50$ on the second hand market + require SDR memory (also expensive) Pozdrawiam. -- RusH // http://pulse.pdi.net/~rush/qv30/ Like ninjas, true hackers are shrouded in secrecy and mystery. You may never know -- UNTIL IT'S TOO LATE. |
#10
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Tony Hill wrote: On Mon, 05 Jul 2004 14:41:02 GMT, "Yousuf Khan" wrote: Peter Mount wrote: I'm currently using a Pentium 2-350 with 448 mb PC-100 SDRAM and an ATI Radeon 64mb video card with a SoundBlaster 64 card. I'm using ColdFusion MX to develop a sample web application with. Will a Celeron make a big enough difference or should I look at Pentium 4? I've looked at prices of AMD but I'm concerned about not being able to upgrade to a Pentium if I get an AMD machine. I was thinking of maybe getting a Celeron for now and upgrading it to a Pentium 4 later on. If upgradeability is the priority, then you shouldn't even consider Intel. In the past four years, Intel has had three different socket formats the Pentium 4/Celeron line, whereas AMD has kept steady with a single format for Athlon XP/Duron line.You could have conceivably started with a 700Mhz Duron about 4 years ago and upgraded it to a 3200+ Athlon XP today using the same motherboard. (Mind you a motherboard from four years ago, may not have had all of the voltages and front-side bus speeds needed for the latest Athlon XPs, but socket format has stayed exactly the same since then.) I can assure you that a 4 year old Socket A motherboard would absolutely NOT support an AthlonXP 3200+, even if the socket is the same. Heck, my two year old board (that recently committed suicide) was not capable of handling such chips, it was limited to 266MT/s bus speeds. Only socket A boards built in about the last year have been able to handle the latest and greatest chips. Long story short, you're screwed when it comes to upgradability no matter who you chose. No matter what motherboard you buy now you're upgrades are going to be VERY limited, no matter how much sockets may change. Buying a system now with plans for upgrades more than 6 months in the future is a sure fire way to waste your money! Luckily, motherboards are around £100 these days, not the £300 I paid for an AT board some years ago. |
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