Is a Celeron OK for me?

"Yousuf Khan" wrote in message
ers.com...
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.

What do you do with all those CPUs that you "upgrade"? I'm finally going to
put in the "scrap heap" an old P100 board that I've been using to test the
latest
versions of FreeBSD on. I'm glad I don't also have a number of processors that I
was
tempted into buying that would be hundreds of more dollars in the heap.

"Upgrading" ain't all it's cracked up to be. Don't "upgrade" until it hurts.
Save your
money to buy a "complete" (motherboard, memory, hard disk, cpu) system instead
(is my opinion). Find something to do with the old PC (give it away, sell it,
put it out
on the LAN, make it the kids' PC .. whatever). Also, don't buy the high end or
bleeding
edge stuff if you don't need it.

AJ