Conclusion
I think most of you have already read Tom's review of the new AMD Duron processor , which is meant to be Celeron's competitor. As you can see in the Duron benchmarks, this new AMD processor beats the Celeron in every benchmark and positions itself just below the Pentium III. However, we are not comparing the Celeron to the Duron, but merely the low-cost solution Celeron to the official high-end chip Pentium III. Although Duron seems to be preferable low-cost solution today, Celeron could be interesting in the following cases:
- for people who want to upgrade from a Pentium II (233-333 MHz) without exchanging motherboard and RAM as well.
- for people who have large amounts of PC66 SDRAM memory
- for people who cannot afford expensive components
- for people who want to get a cheap CPU now and upgrade to a fast Pentium III later
Even though the Duron provides superior performance to the Celeron for the same price, the AMD processor requires a new KT133 motherboard and at least PC100 memory. At this point, most KT133 motherboards cost more than platforms for Celeron or Pentium III processors based on VIA's Apollo Pro 133A chipset. That's why many people might prefer to upgrade their Pentium II or old Celeron system with a new Celeron processor.
One very interesting issue regarding the Celeron is its overclocking capability, which was left out of this article intentionally. We are already dealing with part two of this article, which will focus on this issue exclusively.
