Upgrading a Celeron

Thordon

Ive been looking into upgrading someones Celeron 2.7ghz to a P4 2.4ghz, the reason for this is that he has a Radeon 9800 Pro and 3/4gig of 333mhz RAM, but his performance is much lower than I expected it to be. The general consensus I have seen is that Celerons are dismal as gaming processors. Before I go ahead and suggest this upgrade, I could use some clarification on some things:

1) I know its a celeron, but Im not sure if its a celeron D (which is apparently a good deal better), here are the specs given by Everest:

CPU Properties:
CPU Type Intel Celeron 4A, 2700 MHz (27 x 100)
CPU Alias Northwood-128
CPU Stepping D1
Instruction Set x86, MMX, SSE, SSE2
Original Clock 2700 MHz
Engineering Sample No
L1 Trace Cache 12K Instructions
L1 Data Cache 8 KB
L2 Cache 128 KB (On-Die, ATC, Full-Speed)

Based on the fact that its a 400mhz FSB and Intels site shows Celeron D's as being 533mhz FSB, it seems like it must be an 'old' celeron, can anyone confirm this.

2) Obviously going from 2.7ghz clock speed to 2.4ghz might seem a bit odd, is the performance boost from changing to a p4 really going to be worth it (like 2x better at least).

3) Im fairly sure I know what I need to buy, but just in case, here are the mobo/chipset and my proposed upgrade:

Mobo: http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/genericDocument?lc=en&cc=us&docname=c00019945
Chipset: http://www.intel.com/design/chipsets/845ge/
Processor: http://www.overclockers.co.uk/acatalog/Intel_Pentium_4_Socket_478.html (one at the top)

4) Edit: Also, power consumption, he has a 300w noname PSU, seems a bit too close to call whether this will be enough, but I dont have much experience in this area.

Thanks

Tom Dunne

You may not need to upgrade the motherboard.

I had a Celeron 2.8 Ghz (socket 478) and just took it out and replaced it with a Pentium 4 3.2Ghz.

I posted a while back on it - I have a laptop with an ATI chipset (yes, an ATI chipset) and the motherboard was obviously designed to take multiple types of processors.

As for performance boost - yes, you will notice a difference, the P4's have more cache with makes a lot of difference.

astrofool

thats the old celeron based on northwood core (CPU Alias Northwood-128). The new celerons are prescott based.

That prescott 2.4 is fairly overpriced really, you'd be better off going with an ath 64 2800+ which is ALOT faster. Also a prescott below 3.2ghz is slower than the equivelent northwood chip.

pwd

Apparently celeron's are highly suitable for overclocking, which could be an alternative to replcaing the processor.
One nice feature with Celerons is that encdoing video uses about 40% of the processor time, meaning you can still use the computer while that it is happening. If you do this witha pentium all the processor time will be used up and you can't do anything until it's finished.
I'm surprised you need to upgrade really. I'm using a 2.2 ghz celeron with 256 MB RAM and it's fine, although I am going to upgrade to 768MB RAM when I get my tft (which will need a higher resolution) and my telly tuner card.

Dempsey

pwd wrote:

One nice feature with Celerons is that encdoing video uses about 40% of the processor time, meaning you can still use the computer while that it is happening. If you do this witha pentium all the processor time will be used up and you can't do anything until it's finished.

Depends if ya have HT and the process priority of your video encoding program. My PC is just as responsive with im video encoding as it would be idle. The video encoding will use all of CPU Time until ANY other program need to run. What is the process priority of your program?

I have a P4 without HT and its nowhere near my P4c in terms of multitasking.

Thordon

That prescott 2.4 is fairly overpriced really, you'd be better off going with an ath 64 2800+ which is ALOT faster. Also a prescott below 3.2ghz is slower than the equivelent northwood chip.

I was hoping to avoid having to upgrade the motherboard too, the 2800+ is the same price as the P4 2.4ghz, but I would need a new mobo then too costing at least 70. I dont know how well that will go down, Ill suggest it anyway.

I'm surprised you need to upgrade really

Im looking for a PC that will run half life 2 smoothly at mid-high settings, the system in sig, despite its low-mid graphics and limited RAM, runs HL2 much faster than the system I want to upgrade (which has more albeit slower ram, and a much better graphics card), the only reason I can see for this is the CPU.

Tom Dunne

pwd wrote:

Apparently celeron's are highly suitable for overclocking, which could be an alternative to replcaing the processor.

Overclocking or not, it's other factors such as cache that make the difference. My Celeron was 2.8Ghz with 1 gig of ram and it was a pig.

pwd wrote:

One nice feature with Celerons is that encdoing video uses about 40% of the processor time, meaning you can still use the computer while that it is happening.

Hmmm, I'd have to disagree with you here. I "discovered" the whole digital camera thing over the summer and found that encoding/making DVD's ground my Celeron to a halt. I really couldn't do anything apart from go off and leave it for an hour or so.

pwd wrote:

I'm surprised you need to upgrade really. I'm using a 2.2 ghz celeron with 256 MB RAM and it's fine

Hmmm, see above. 2.8Ghz + 1 gig = pig. Depends on what you want to do with it, really.

Thordon

By the way, in the end I ordered an A64 2800+ + mobo.