Advice on budget upgrade

for the price of the adapter and processor you can get a 1.3GHz Duron and mobo.. make sure you get a mobo that supports sdram and you will be laughing! the Durons piss all over the Celerons performance and price wise. an d you could sell your old mobo and p3 to raise a little extra cash if you want

I'm out of my mind, but feel free to leave a message.

Someone will come in here lying about how bus speed is the only difference and that the performance difference is small. WEll, my Coppermine PIII 700@933 outperformed my Celeron 1200@1480 by a small margin in the only application I needed more speed in, GAMES. I hear that professional apps would favor the higher clocked Celeron by a fairly large margin though.

Well there is another difference between them: Pentium III's have the Cache Latency set at Cas0 cycles, while Celerons are set at Cas1. That's probably where the biggest difference came at in games. But there's probably 15% performance gain to be had by the higher bus speed also.

The problem is, PIII Tualatins are VERY expensive. So I'm going to suggest overclocking. A Tualatin Celeron 1000 (you know it's Tualatin if it has 256k cache) should overclock fairly easily to 1333MHz and be faster than a Celeron 1400, due to better bandwidth of the busses. A Tualatin Celeron 1100 MIGHT overclock to 1466 and is a better deal if it does, the 1100 is cheaper than the 1000! But the 1200 is NOT likely to reach 133MHz bus (1600MHz!) like the other two, so I can't recommend it.

<font color=blue>You're posting in a forum with class. It may be third class, but it's still class!</font color=blue>

Crashman & JCLW, thank-you both for your informative replies. I'm not interested in gaming AT ALL, so that's not a factor. My primary use for the computer is Internet access (Netscape 7.0) and the odd spread sheet or document processing (Office 97). In which case you both seem to lean towards recommending the Celeron if I read you correctly. I was leaning in that direction too -- because of the $ advantage.

JCLW, you're right, my motherboard supports both 100mhz and 133mhz FSB, which should make things a bit more flexible for overclocking. You also mention the lack of a voltage regulator in the adapter that I am considering. Is that going to be a problem? My current motherboard bios allows a voltage setting no lower than 1.65V which I am currently using with my existing Coppermine CPU.

I am not against overclocking, but I'm not interested in extra-ordinary efforts to do so, i.e. I'd prefer to stick with the original Intel supplied heat-sink and fan and increasing recommended voltage by NO MORE THAN one notch (if necessary).

slvr_phoenix, I already have 384 megabytes memory installed so I think I'm OK in that department. And where did I say that my two installed hard drives are NOT running at 7200 rpm?

As for the rest, perhaps I didn't explain myself fully. I day-trade for a living so I'm on the net a minimum of 8 hours per day and usually longer. For my trading I use several java applets for streaming stock quotes, charting, etc. The java applets are quite CPU intensive and I'm sure I would benefit (even if only a little bit) there.

Actually, the system I have now is adequate for what I am currently doing, I just thought that with this (hopefully cheap) upgrade, I could get enough life out of my system to skip the P4 upgrade path altogether and do my next MAJOR upgrade when Intel comes out with the P5 or whatever their plans for the future are.

Liar. If it would go 1600 why do you think I had it at 1480? 1480 was the LIMIT, I tried voltages all the way up to 1.85v! So if YOURS hit 1600MHz, you were lucky. If you've never had the experience, you have no room to talk.

Currently I'm running a Celeron 1100 at 1466MHz. And it DOES do everything better than my PIII 1000EB, which just goes to show me that 133MHz bus is roughly what the CPU needs to overcome it's deficits. But my 1200 would not TOUCH 133MHz FSB.

<font color=blue>You're posting in a forum with class. It may be third class, but it's still class!</font color=blue>

Well then, in that case you really have no reason to upgrade as far as I'm concerned. (Well, that is unless you have those HDs on ATA33 or lower.)

You could be on 24 hours a day. Your internet speed is determined first by your internet connection, secondly by your hard drive, and thirdly by the amount of RAM you have. I've never once seen a processor maxed out by the internet, and I've run Pentium 133s for internet use.

What you should really be concerned about is your internet connection. What are you connecting with and what's your typical bandwidth?

I've <i>never</i> seen a CPU intensive java applet. Only a complete and utter fool would program <i>anything CPU intensive</i> in <i>Java</i>. So on the very rare chance that your Java applets really <i>are</i> CPU intensive, I'd highly suggest finding a non-Java solution instead because that would make a world of difference.

On top of that, if I were a betting man, I'd bet that your Java applets are a lot more bandwidth bottlenecked than CPU bottlenecked.

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