Hello Everybody,

I have a friend here in Greece, who wants to purchase a PC. I advised her to go for the Intel Pentium 4 processor, she has been advised to go for the Celeron chip. I advised her to go for the Intel pentium because when I was going for my PC a year and a half ago I too was advised to go for the pentium 3, (4 was not available then), by a good friend of mine who is a computer technician in OZ.

He told me that the Celeron chips were not very good and that they had problems such as causing the PC to lock up with certain programmes and games. She has been advised by some computer techies here, to go for the Celeron chip, plus it is cheaper. Has the chip been sorted out now, or is it still faulty these days?

Which should she go for?

It will be a home PC.

Any advice would be much appreciated as I'm no expert and still learning.

Cheers,

Wrexy.

IMHO the only difference between PIII and Celeron chips is cost / cache / bus speed and the average person will see little difference between a PIII or Celeron of the same speed. I have never been aware of problems with celerons causing Lockup / crashes etc.

Generaly the only applications that require loads of CPU power is games. If she is going to be playing games get either an AMD athlon or P4 based system. If its only used for Web browsing / Word processing go for a Duron or Celeron.

Do not buy a PIII as they are more expensive then P4s now. The only other advantage Athlons/P4 have over thier little brothers is future proofing.

No problems with Celerons, I've been overclocking mine for three years now! ;)

Agree with the above. Don't get suckered into buying the fastest processor available, you will get much better performance (and flexibility) out of a machine with lots of RAM and a big hard disk.

Unless she is a hard core gamer, any CPU that runs at 800Mhz or faster will easily cope with Windows 98 / ME / 2000. Anything faster is overkill IMO.

Go for at least 256MB and a 40GB hard disk.

Agree with the others - buying a P3 now is short sighted. They aren't getting any faster apart from the P3s which are pitched at the server market (at a server price). There's a new Celeron based on the P4 due out later this year.

Fellas,

Thank you very much for the advice. I will pass all of this info on to her.

Kind regards,

Wrexy.

Bit more time to reply now...

The first Celerons (ie 266Mhz) were indeed dogs. IIRC, they had no on chip cache and generally sucked. I didn't hear of any stability issues though.

The first decent Celery was the 300A (A to note it had some on chip cache), which just happened to overclock nicely to 450Mhz. Mine ran at 450Mhz for many happy months.

Since then the Celerons have generally been pretty good, although Mhz for Mhz, a Duron will beat one in most benchmarks. The 366 would overclock up to 550Mhz and beyond - I've got two that run nicely at 550.

Cheers Chris. :)