Budget CPU Shootout: Clash of the 'rons
by Derek Wilson on December 4, 2003 10:55 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
DivX Encoding
As we have done before, we used Gordian Knot to encode Chapter 9 of the movie, The Sum of all Fears, with the DivX 5.1 codec. Again, we did a 2-pass encoding and averaged the frame rates of the two passes to get our score.Generally, encoding is an area where Intel's processors shine, but this time, it's a different story. Only the fastest Celerons that we tested were able to keep up with the slowest AMD processors. The 2.6GHz Celeron only beats the 1.6GHz Duron by about half a frame per second. When we saw this test stacking up the way it has, we lost hope in any Celeron keeping up with even the least expensive AMD processors in any test.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
97 Comments
View All Comments
Keeksy - Thursday, December 4, 2003 - link
Great article. I never knew the Celeron was such a bad performer. If I had to build a new machine on budget, I'd definitely go with a Barton Athlon.Hey, what's with the freaking huge ads at the top of every page? Really annoying.
pxc - Thursday, December 4, 2003 - link
I'm a little happier about the Duron 1.8GHz/motherboard combo I purchased now for $60 on black Friday. :D As a bonus, it's a 1.5v core and came unlocked. With 2 pencil traces and a short wire, it's an 11.5x 333MHz FSB Duron which still performs great without the rest of the cache enabled and has headroom for overclocking.The Celerons are really affected by the low speed memory (@ PC2100 on the test system) more than any other processors. Those processors would still lag in this review, the Celerons would have scaled better on other chipsets that allow better memory/FSB ratios. For example, PC3200 on single channel to match the bandwidth of the 400MHz FSB (SiS and VIA) or dual channel PC2100 (SiS648).
FishTankX - Thursday, December 4, 2003 - link
..Why does it say 'It is clear which *card* 'offers the better performance'??Pandaren - Thursday, December 4, 2003 - link
Is anyone suprised at all by these test results? THG OC'ed a Celeron to 3 GHz a few months ago and even then, the Pentium 4 2.0A beat the pants off the Celeron.Fact is that most consumers don't give a rats @ss if they will get half the FPS in a game they will never buy or play. For email, Microsoft Word, and AOHell, a 2.6 GHz Celeron will seem the same as a 1.6 GHz Duron to the average person.
I am sure that Compaq and other retail companies are well aware of the current Celeron's shortcomings. I am also sure that they will pay this article no heed and that they really don't care. The Celeron is mediocre enough.
What I'd like to see is Celeron M (Banias-512) based desktops in the budget segment. This 800 MHz wonder provides all the office firepower most people need, and probably doesn't even need a fan to keep it cool.
Boonesmi - Thursday, December 4, 2003 - link
and whats is really pitiful is that the 1.6ghz duron is faster then the P4 1.8A in most testsand the duron only costs $41 LOL
Boonesmi - Thursday, December 4, 2003 - link
dang!!celerons suck more then i though!!
mattsaccount - Thursday, December 4, 2003 - link
The message is clear! Celerons are even worse than I thought...