Battling Brothers: Celeron vs. Pentium 4

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Price/ Performance: Celeron Or Cheap Pentium 4?

Don’t let yourself be fooled by pure clock speed. In most of the benchmarks, the Celeron lags considerably behind the Pentium 4. The reason is the smaller L2 cache on the Celeron, which has to get by with only 128 kB. The Pentium 4 based on the Willamette core, on the other hand, has 256 kB. But it’s being phased out in favor of the more modern Northwood core - by refining manufacturing down to 0.13 micrometer structures, Intel has managed to squeeze 512 kB L2 cache onto the chip, which is four times the Celeron’s cache. We used the latest Pentium 4 core for the tests in this article.

Test Setup

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System Hardware
ProcessorsIntel Celeron Willamette, 1.7 GHz Intel Pentium 4 Northwood, 1.7 GHz
MotherboardsABit BD7, i845D chipset
RAM256 MB PC266 DDR-SDRAM, CL2, Corsair Micro
Hard DriveIBM DeskStar 60 GXP, IC35L040,40 GB, 7,200 rpm, 2 MB Cache
Other Hardware
Network Card3COM 3C905TX-B, 100 MBit
Graphics CardABit Siluro GF3nVIDIA GeForce 3, 64 MB DDR-RAM
Drivers & Software
Graphics DrivernVIDIA Detonator 4 Series, V 28.32 WHQL
Chipset DriverIntel INF-Update 3.20.1008Intel Application Accelerator 2.2VIA 4in1 4.37
DirectX Version8.1
OSWindows 2000 Professional, Service Pack 3, SRP1
Benchmarks & Settings
Quake III ArenaRetail Version 1.16command line = +set cd_nocd 1 +set s_initsound 0Benchmark Using DEMO001 und NV15DEMO
3DMark 2001 SEDefault Settings, 1024x768x16
SiSoft Sandra 2002Professional EditionCPU Arithmetic BenchmarkCPU Multimedia BenchmarkMemory Benchmark
PCMark2002CPU & Memory Benchmarks
BAPCo SYSmark2002Office Productivity/ Internet Content Productivity
LameMP3 Encoding, Version 3.89MMX
WinACE2.11, 178 MB WAV FileBest compression, 4096 kB dictionary
Xmpeg 4.5 / Divx 5 ProMPEG-4 EncodingDivX 5.01 Pro (YV12)Compression/quality : SlowestData Rate : 780 kbitFormat : 720x576 Pixel@25 fps150 MB VOB file, no Audio