Celeron Vs. Pentium 4: David Vs. Goliath

From right to left: Pentium 4 2.26, Celeron 2.0, Celeron 1.8. It is impossible to differentiate between the different CPUs without the writing on the top.

Our test results leave little room for uncertainty. Despite the changeover to the Northwood core and a cool 2 GHz, the Celeron still falls way behind Pentium 4 models in most benchmarks tests. The differences are obvious: 128 rather than 512 kB L2 cache, and 400 rather than 533 MHz FSB clockspeed trim down the Pentium 4 architecture so much that the performance of the 2 GHz processor can only be described as adequate.

Celeron Vs. Athlon XP: Same Conditions, Astonishing Results

In the coming months, Intel's new 845PE, 845GE and 845GV chipsets will flood the market, and also enable support of DDR333. But in the low-cost sector economy is of prime importance, so for the tests we went back to DDR266 (CL2).

We "doctored" the AMD system in the same way. It is true that most home users would equip their systems with DDR333, but this would not reflect the picture in the market for complete systems. DDR266 remains the standard specification.

Once more Celeron fails to impress; in almost every discipline the Athlon XP takes a handsome victory, despite the considerably lower clock speed. The floating-point-intensive SPECviewperf is a discipline in which the Athlon excels.