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Information
on Intel Processors
Why
confuse me - what's the difference between all these processors?
The
Intel PIII is the mainstream Intel processor. The Intel Celeron
was designed for the budget end of the market. The Pentium P4 is
their latest and some believe slower than the PIII and Athlon of
equivalent clock speeds.
Can
I buy a computer flexible to take all these
processors?
No,
you can't. PIIIs and Celerons are available in the Socket 370
format (shape of the processor). Pentium 4s are a different shape
and don't fit on the socket 370 motherboards. No Intel based Celeron,
PIII or P4 PC can take an AMD
processor, and vice-versa. Note: New Pentium 4 processors are not
423 pin processors anymore. They now have 478 pins and therefore
do not fit on earlier Pentium 4 motherboards.
So
which one is faster?
A
PIII processor of the same clock speed as a Celeron will be faster
because of the extra L2 pipeline burst cache on it. As Intel
wants to drop the PIIIs all newer and faster clock speeds are only
released in P4. P4s are
expected to be faster when the software optimised for their
"different" way of operating become more widely
available. As of Feb 2002 the P4s trailed higher end AMD Athlons
badly in performance.
What's
the cache?
All
that the cache does is speed up certain applications. The Celeron
has only 128 KB of cache, the Pentium has between 256 to 512 KB.
That
still doesn't answer my question - how do I know which one I need
to run my applications?
All
these processors are designed to run all types of general
application, office software, games etc. Essentially, it does boil
down to budget: The Celeron makes for a good budget purchase.
There's little to choose between the 512 or the 256 KB Intel PIII
processors for all other computers. The advice from the PC
Magazines tends to be that you should concentrate less on the
processor itself and look at the overall specifications of the PC.
The type of motherboard, amount and quality of RAM, size and speed
of the hard disk all contribute more to performance than the
processor itself. The size and quality of the monitor and the
quality of the keyboard and mouse also tend to be important
considerations. Bottom line: Don't buy on just processor speed.
want
more help?
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