stevenuk300

I am looking to upgrade my PC, but unsure which processor to have. What are peoples opinions on Celeron, Athlon or Pentium 4?
Basically want to use the PC for playing games, Internet access, copying CD's and DVD's, spreadsheets etc.

JohnnyRob

It's gotta be the Xp Athlon IMO.

Great value for money and if you want to venture into the world of overclocking you can get a sub £50 chip running 2ghz +

Had Celerons in the past which ran faultlessly, but the P4s were just more money so this time round I chose AMD.

stevenuk300

Is there any noticable difference in speed between the P4 and Athlon?

super_si

I used the Barton XP2500 on the girlfriends pc, it ran quite happy i was impressed with it.

Si

jase555

usually about 300mhz

xp1700 = 1400
xp2200 = 1900

so a p4 2.4 = xp2800

i think roughly, I prefer p4 but thats my opinion

jase

medders

AMD name their chips as a direct comparison to the clock speed of Intel chips, rather than the actual clockspeed of the AMD chip.

They reckon that their slower clockspeeds are the equivalent of a higher intel clockspeed.

Tomshardware is a good place to go for the real figures......

Paul

JohnnyRob

If you want to get involved with 'modding' your PC and overclocking you can get an XP1700+ AMD chip (must be the right stepping CPU tho, not just any 1700+) from www.cpucity.co.uk for £43 which will run at 2.1ghz with a little tinkering (but you must have a mobo that'll allow it)

For £43 (and a decent heatsink @ £10) 2.1ghz has gotta be a real bargain?

I'm not so sure, but I don't think you'll acheive the same with a P4 (if this is your bag, that is).

BTW- I'm typing on such a high speed XP1700+ driven machine right now, running 2104mhz

Gordo

Johnnyrob - which motherboard would you suggest?

ozzy

I've always been an Intel man myself (even since the 80386 when I was a very very young lad), but for my current PC I've switched over to an AMD XP2000+, primarily because (at the time) the Intel P4 equivelant was a lot more expensive if you included the motherboard and RAM price differences.

It's been just as reliable as all my previous PC's, but the only thing I've noticed (and it's still haunting me) is it runs a lot hotter than I'd have expected.

On full chat, it's around 55 degress Celcious I've experimented with few cases and fans (2nd-hand jobs) and it looks like a ventilation issue, so spend some money on a decent heatsink, cpu fan and case.

We have Dell P4 2.4Ghz PC's here with over 1Gb of RAM and my home PC does seem a good deal faster, although Dell have never been known for utilising the hardware to it's maximum.

Stefan

stevenuk300

I'm not into building one myself as I wouldn't have a clue where to start, but I was looking at buying something that would last a few years without having the need to upgrade.
I am looking at this kind of spec:
2.8mhz processor
120gb Hard Drive
at least 512mb memory
decent graphics card and CD re writer.

Any suggestions on what sort of deals are about at the moment?
There is a Medion make in Toys R Us, which is of excellent spec for around £800, but I've never heard of Medion before.

JohnnyRob

Gordo - I've found Asus to be a very good mobo manufacturer. I'm using the A7V8X and this provides all the required settings to wind my CPU up nicely

The Nforce Asus board (A7N8X) is said to be very good, but just beyond my budget when I was looking for a mobo . By all avccounts this is a very good board.

Miles

I used to only look at Intel stuff partly 'cos of my background in servers and partly after being mucked about five years ago with AMD and Cyrix (remember them ) processors.
But more recently I built me own PC and on bang-per-buck grounds went with the AMD/ASUS route. AMD coupled with a good motherboard (like the A7N8X Dlx like wot I've got ) is certainly on a par with the Intel offering. However for ultimate performance at the current time seems to be the Intel route.