POLL: Would you buy Durons/Celerons if they were the "leading edge" of speed grades?

[MadRat]

Durons and Celerons are the low end of the pool of performance, often almost half the speed of the leading chips on the market. However, these chips aren't just lower speeds, they are also stripped of the cache necessary for them to compete at any meaningful equivalent of their full-blown brethren.

My question is basically, would you buy Durons/Celerons if they were the "leading edge" of speed grades?

Example:

P4 Northwood 3.06 GHz (HT, 512k L2) $500
P4 Celeron 3.06 GHz (HT, 128k L2) $250

The Celeron might not have the same performance in office aps, but it would be great in multimedia and run alot cooler at half the price. Realistically speaking the Celerons would have almost no impact on the sales of P4's that are above 2GHz, knowing how poorly the performance of the Celeron is at 3GHz. Informed customers might even opt for 2GHz P4'd rather than use the 3.06GHz Celerons. At the same time the Celeron would offer Intel less overall risk of failure, making them tempting for the crowd who just want raw megahertz.

 

[Baronz]

Perhaps, but wouldn't the lack of cache completely kill the performance?

Because I remember looking at 2-2.4ghz celeron benchmarks and they were pathetic.

 

[Duvie]

that is why I said as long as cache was 1/2 as much meaning running like a willamette...unfortunately I think that would just be too close to the current p4s and steal their thunder since most users even here would be fine without it....

When the p4's go to 800fsb they should take the celerons to 533 and do the 256kb of cache and therefore the newer p4s will be quite stunning compared to them do to 1mb of cache, higher fsb bandwidth, and HT2...

 

[0roo0roo]

only thing keeping the cellies down is the cache right?

from my experience with the celly 1-2 the lower fsb only helps you overclock them so its almost attractive. its just the cache that sucks. too bad the tually stopped at 1.4ghz.

also with intel it seems their first couple celerons always suck. it wasn't until coppermine celly that they were decent, then better as tually. right now p4 based celly is back to sucking.

 

[Mingon]

and run alot cooler at half the price

They wouldnt run much cooler though.

 

[vegetation]

What helps is the incredible overclocking potential of Celerons, at least some of them. The current 2.0 GHz Celeron certainly lives up to this reputation, with the ability to hit 2.8+ easily, without any need for special cooling. A great chip to use for home theater use where one would be doing a lot of video encoding tasks; something the celeron can do with hardly any performance loss over the regular P4.

 

[Yoshi]

No! And I have had both. But, the idea is to buy the slower CPU and overclock to higher speeds while meeting your budget. I never buy the top speed processor in any line. I get the one the should easily overclock to the current fastest chip in the line.

Over the years I have had:

Celeron 300A@450 on BH6
Celeron 533@800 on Asus CUBX
Duron 800@1000 on Asus VIA KT133A
Penitum III 700E@933 on Asus CUBX
Pentium 4 2.4Ghz@3.1Ghz on Asus P4G8X

 

[majewski9]

I might buy a Duron seeing how the 1.3ghz is only 39 dollars. I wouldnt probaly buy the p4 version Celly unless is was the 2.0 ghz and above but the 1.4 ghz socket 370 seems quite nice.

 

[Horsepower]

A simple NO would be my answer.