Anything Really Wrong w/ A Celeron in a laptop?

[james182]

I was thinking about getting a new laptop for college and was wondering if a celeron would really be that bad. I'm planning on using it for microsoft office applications, surfing the web, mp3s, and possibly some Java programming. No photo editing, no gaming, other than like Age of Empires. but nothing taxing like fps's.
If the answer is no, when is the use of a Celeron okay?

 

[OldSpooky]

There's nothing wrong with a Celeron based laptop for the uses you have described. The disadvantages of a Celeron laptop are as follows:

- Reduced battery life due to lack of power management on the chip
- Machine will run hotter because of the above
- Machine will likely be bulkier due to need for better cooling systems

These disadvantages apply to Celerons based on the Northwood-256 core.

In a few months, Intel is going to release a Celeron based on the Pentium-M processor. According to what I have read on the Inquirer, these chips will be similar to Pentium-Ms, but have 512 kb of L2 cache instead of 1MB (Banias) or 2MB (Dothan). This Celeron will be great for budget Thin-And-Light machines.

 

[Quickfingerz]

The size of the heatsink required for a laptop will be dependent on the maximum power usage of the CPU. Celerons generally will always use less power than their pentium siblings.

 

[dew042]

remember - there are two celeron being used in laptops right now: the mobile one and the desktop one. the mobile one has 256k cache (toshibas are the only ones i have seen with these) and is the same as a mobile pentium 4 otherwise - the desktop one is 128k cache and will suck the battery a bit more.

personally - i think the performance dropoff on a 128k cache processor is HUGE, even on simple day to day stuff.... I set up a lot of laptops and I can tell pretty quickly if a cpu doesn't hack it. they run extremely slow. if you remember the pentium4 only got competitive after the increased cache to 512k and the celeron is based on the same core. also system memory is your best friend in xp....

if budget is an issue - get an amd based machine.

dew.

 

[JZilla]

The Celeron isn't that bad. I am using an old IBM R30 900mhz with a 128k cache Celeron (not mobile, so short battery life) for the same (minus the java and gaming) as you (james) are describing. And it runs Win98, MS Office etc. just fine, even with 128mb ram. Hopefully it will be replaced with a T40 sometime this year.

Just be sure to get a laptop with a mobile Celeron AND 256k cache. Some of the mobile Celerons has 256k, others have 128k. The only way to be really sure is to see the spec sheet for the laptop. And if it doesn't mention mobile and 256k, then contact the manufacturer. But I strongly urge you to get a Centrino laptop, the extra battery life could come in handy if you use it as a portable computer.

 

[dew042]

of course there's also that probelm with celerons just randomly exploding and all - but its rare.




dew.