Intel Celeron 1.7GHz - Pentium 4 Powered

3D Gaming Performance

When it comes to most 3D games there's generally very little performance to be found by heavily optimizing for SSE2 or 3DNow! on either of these processors and thus the performance is mostly dependent on the overall platform (e.g. FPU capabilities, chipset, memory latency/bandwidth, cache latency/bandwidth, etc...).

We'll start off with our favorite 3D gaming benchmark - the Unreal Performance Test 2002. For an explanation of what this test is and why it is so significant, be sure to read our 15-way GPU Shootout that we used to introduce the test. In short, the benchmark uses the current build of the Unreal Engine (that will power games such as UnrealTournament 2003 and Unreal II) and serves as a great indication for future performance in games that use the engine.

Next-Generation 3D Gaming Performance Unreal Performance Test 2002 Build 918 - 1024 x 768 x 32 AMD Athlon XP 1600+ (1.40GHz) Intel Pentium 4 2.0GHz AMD Duron 1.3GHz Intel Pentium 4 1.7GHz Intel Celeron 1.7 @ 2.26GHz Intel Pentium III 1.2 Intel Celeron 1.7GHz Intel Celeron 1.2GHz 42.4 36.6 34.1 33.4 32.1 30.6 27.7 26.2 | 0 | 8 | 17 | 25 | 34 | 42 | 51

Once again we see that although it's a member of AMD's current flagship line, the Athlon XP 1600+ does quite well as a value processor. The small L2 cache of the Celeron hurts its performance in next-generation games such as Unreal Tournament 2003; if you look at any of our high-end desktop CPU comparisons you'll realize that without the 512KB L2 cache of the Northwood core, the Pentium 4 does not do well in many of these gaming tests.

Even overclocking the 1.7GHz Celeron to 2.26GHz can't bring the Celeron up to speed with a 1.7GHz Pentium 4.

3D Gaming Performance Jedi Knight 2 - High Quality - 1024x768x32 AMD Athlon XP 1600+ (1.40GHz) Intel Pentium 4 2.0GHz Intel Pentium 4 1.7GHz Intel Celeron 1.7 @ 2.26GHz AMD Duron 1.3GHz Intel Celeron 1.7GHz Intel Pentium III 1.2 Intel Celeron 1.2GHz 92.5 81.7 76.8 75.9 69.1 65.4 63.3 48.8 | 0 | 19 | 37 | 56 | 74 | 93 | 111

Even under today's latest games the Celeron is in dire need of more cache. It's clear that for the money, the Athlon XP 1600+ is once again the best offering here.

3D Gaming Performance Comanche 4 - High Quality - 1024x768x32 AMD Athlon XP 1600+ (1.40GHz) Intel Pentium 4 2.0GHz Intel Pentium 4 1.7GHz Intel Pentium III 1.2 AMD Duron 1.3GHz Intel Celeron 1.2GHz Intel Celeron 1.7 @ 2.26GHz Intel Celeron 1.7GHz 36.4 33.8 30.2 30.1 28.2 26.5 24.7 20.8 | 0 | 7 | 15 | 22 | 29 | 36 | 44

By far the poorest showing of its performance comes under Comanche 4 where the new Celeron is unable to outperform the 256KB L2 equipped Tualatin-Celeron running at 1.2GHz.