Battle of Lowend CPUS

[thegisguy]

My bothers old 1.8 Ghz Celeron P4 gave out. He only uses his system to surf the net, occationaly burn a cd or dvd, and chat on Skype. He's on a VERY tight budget. My question is do you think I could get away with setting him up with an Atom based system.

What I'm looking at

 

[Andrew1990]

Of course. The old Pentium 4 Celerons were not powerful at all and I would even guess the Atom is on par if not better than that celeron. Especially if it was a Willamette Celeron.

 

[Arkaign]

That's a terrible deal

$39 AR Sempron 3000+ mobo/cpu combo

http://www.newegg.com/Product/...x?Item=N82E16813135060

Or $39 Athlon X2 AM2 cpu http://www.newegg.com/Product/...x?Item=N82E16819103221

+

$42 Nvidia AM2 Mobo http://www.newegg.com/Product/...x?Item=N82E16813153120

+ a cooler (easy and cheap to come by as little as $10)

EDIT : The Atom is a piece of junk that performs horribly, decent only for extreme low-power situations and/or netbooks. No reason to buy it for a desktop when massively faster options are available for the same $$.

 

[heyheybooboo]

That Sempy looks like a pretty good deal and you may be able to reuse your RAMs.

It looks like you would need to purchase a HSF

 

[Andrew1990]

I wouldnt really trust that ECS board with the Sempron if it were me but that is personal preference. The X2 is a solid choice as well.

The atom should only be considered above the X2 and sempron if you want a very small mini ITX computer that is a few watts lower in power than the sempron. Also, look for the dual core Atom 330 if you go that route.

 

[thegisguy]

Thanks. That Sempron 3000+ mobo/cpu combo is perfect. Like HeyheyBooBoo said I can reuse his ram.

 

[LostPassword]

don't get the atom, even for surfing the web. even youtube has hi-def streaming videos now, i don't even know if atom can handle that.

 

[magreen]

Like everyone said, definitely don't go atom, because it'll cost more.

But just for the record, I think a 1.6GHz atom would be a tad faster or about equal to a 1.8GHz p4 celeron.

Here's my logic, and I know it's very approximate: a 1.6GHz atom is roughly equivalent to a 1.0GHz Pentium M Dothan acc. to AT. Now, a 1.6GHz Dothan is about equivalent to a 2.8GHz Pentium 4, acc to an old AT article on dothan. So if everything scaled perfectly with clockspeed, a 1GHz Dothan would perform like a 1.8GHz Pentium 4, and a 1GHz Dothan is also like an atom at 1.6GHz. Now I know nothing scales perfectly with clockspeed, but this is just an approximation.

So it seems Atom is roughly equal clock for clock with Pentium 4, and a touch faster than a p4 celeron clock for clock.

 

[hans007]

the 1.6 atom is roughly equivalent to a 900 mhz or so celeron M. the first asus netbooks were 900mhz celeron Ms and are faster.

the athlon 64 2000+ blows the doors off the 1.6 atom. its twice as fast at somethings. a 1.8 p4 celeron would probably be equivalent to a pentium M 1.3 ghz or so. So it'd still be faster than an atom.

Maybe a dual core atom would work. but atoms have difficulty with 720p video. a 1.8 p4 will have for one thing a 1.8ghz FPU which will really help in those sort of things (the fpu in the p4s was not bad at all and was as fast clock for clock as pentium Ms which ran at lower speeds)