mjdbb1 Posted March 31, 2011 Share Posted March 31, 2011 Need to make a quick decision here between 2 laptops for basic internet/email/office work for a family member. Model A is 1.5 GHZ Celeron M with 2.0 GB of ram. Model B is a 1.7 GHZ Pentium 4 with 512 mb ram. Both are running Windows XP. If you had to choose, which would have better performance? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CoffeeFiend Posted March 31, 2011 Share Posted March 31, 2011 The Celeron M 1.5GHz is almost twice as fast as a P4 1.7GHz, and it also has 4x as much RAM. Easy choice to make for sure. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nitroshift Posted March 31, 2011 Share Posted March 31, 2011 I second CoffeeFiend's post. Choice A anytime. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mjdbb1 Posted March 31, 2011 Author Share Posted March 31, 2011 The Celeron 1.5 is faster than the Pentium 1.7?? I always thought Celerons were bottom of the barrel... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CoffeeFiend Posted March 31, 2011 Share Posted March 31, 2011 The Celeron 1.5 is faster than the Pentium 1.7?? I always thought Celerons were bottom of the barrel...Celerons never were as bad as a lot of people put it in the first place. They're cut back versions of their flagship CPUs but they're certainly NOT crippled junk. Most of the time they actually offered great value (almost the same performance for most things, but for a lot less money)The other thing is, "Celeron" by itself means very little (same for their Xeon brand). They had Celerons based on the Pentium 2, the Pentium 3, the Pentium 4, the Pentium M, the Core 2 Duo series and now Nehalem. Performance can vary dramatically between two Celerons depending on what "generation" of CPU they're based on. The Celeron M @ 1.5GHz is based on the Pentium M which is a LOT more efficient (much higher IPC) than the Netburst junk that is the Pentium 4 so it's no surprise it's a lot faster still (clock speed is very similar too). The *only* difference between that Celeron M and the Pentium M it's based on is that it only has 512KB of L2 cache vs 1MB for the Pentium M.Not that I could pay much for such a laptop mind you. Any modern ~$400 laptop completely slaughters it in every possible way, and there are faster netbooks out there as well for even less (based on some of the newer Atom CPUs or the new AMD V-series CPUs). And those come with a warranty, a new battery that actually hold a charge, they have a lot more disk space, they have a better LCD, they come with a newer OS and so on. But hey, if it's dirt cheap (definitely under $200) then why not. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mjdbb1 Posted March 31, 2011 Author Share Posted March 31, 2011 Wow, thanks for that info....if you asked me yesterday to compare a Celeron M and a Pentium 4 I would have assumed that the Pentium would blow it out of the water.I actually had a chance to play with them both today....and I was surprised the P4 was so slow (although I know it did have 512mb ram). The Celeron system was actually a lot faster. It's only $50 and it's just for internet browsing and basic stuff, so I think it's worth it.Thanks for the info!!! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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