DescentBB

Found this cool deal and am thinking of picking it up just wanted to know if I should expect problems with newer games. Im not asking if celeron is better than a amd I'm asking if I will have problems.

http://www.tigerdirect.ca/applications/ ... 2&CatId=14

Newer games will probably want a bit more for peak performance, but should run, however, you're shortchanging yourself IMO. With processors, you generally get what you pay for.

Just remember that Celeron is the k-mart brand. (or whatever your local dollar-store type place is called)

NO. Celerons suck.
YES. Performance will be degraded.
YES. Any AMD core will beat the snot out of it.

Celerons have positively miniscule on-die cache, and this makes the (lengthy) pipeline in the Celeron often do an entire cycle while waiting for data. It's the worst possible choice for gaming.

From xBitLabs today:

Our comparative tests of the Sempron 3400+ and Intelâ??s Celeron 351 show that AMDâ??s value processor delivers more performance in a majority of applications, especially in games where the Sempron 3400+ is nearly 50% faster than the competing solution. Thus, we can state that the Sempron 3400+ is currently the best choice in its price category.

Here is the article Moby is quoting. As you can see, even the Celeron D 351 gets assraped by an Athlon 3000+. Skip the 340.

If all you were going to do is surf the web, then the celeron would be a good choice. Otherwise, HELL NO!

Well I didn't end up getting a new processor just a mother board (Asus P4P800 SE) for 135 and am saving up for a P4 processor (socket 478).

Just a small point with upgrading. on NO ACCOUNT should you EVER buy one component and then save for the next piece.

Make SURE you buy ALL the parts at the same time. This will avoid the tragic situation of buying parts which devalue substantially while you save for the next bit.

That was something I was worried about particually with a 478 mobo. But with my attitude (as long as I can run the latest freeware games I'm happy) The P4 3. GHz Ill be getting in about 3-9 months should keep me going for almost two years.

It was either do this or keep what I have untill I can afford to buy a mobo CPU and RAM all at once. I had two PCs a PIII 800 with 384 SD RAM and a 256 MB 5500 GT vid card. And a P4 1.7 128 DDR RAM and a 64 MB integrated intel Video. I coulden't over clock anything because I had stock mobos. I coulden't put the vid card in the P4 caus the mobo had no agp slot. It could also olny hold two DIMMS of ram. So I bought the new mobo and 256 MB of DDR for the P4.

Now Ill have one Good computer P4 1.7 GHz 384 MB DDR RAM a 256 MB 5500 GT vid card. The other one is currently un opperational due to lazyness.

Once I get a new Processor and a ok vid card Ill have parts for three decent computers

heh. The latest freeware games.

I'm feeling the need to upgrade my AMD 3000+ system, 6 months after I bought it.

My 2 1.7ghz computers are currently media file servers, CD burners & media players. Oh yeah, and I run MIRC on one. They could probably run gameservers for me too.

This 1.0ghz celeron machine here at the office works great... for Word, Excel & web surfing. It won't play DIVX video though, much less play any kind of 'modern' video game. In fact, a lot of flash sites perform abyssmally. An example is this website: http://www.esuvee.com/flash.htm.

My brother has a 3200+ Athlon 64 / 1 GB system that tears badly when playing back video, it's not the CPU that makes video playback suck, it's the $30 dollar GF4 MX4000 video card.

heh. You'd have to see this to believe it... You can lay some of the blame on the video card, and relatively low RAM (512), I'm sure... But it runs uncompressed video just fine... Try running any sort of compressed video, however, and the whole system tanks to the point of mouse lag and framerates in the low single digits on the video

Use media player classic, and use vmr7 (renderless) or vmr9 renderless if you have DX9 installed. That much lag sounds like a codec problem tho, trash all your current codecs and then install the CCCP ---> http://forum.zhentarim.net/viewtopic.ph ... sc&start=0

heh

I installed and played D3 on my dad's crappy Dell laptop with a Celeron CPU running at 2 GHz or whatever. It SUCKS! I only get an average of 52 fps in D3. And D3 is old!

Well, theres two things wrong there.

1. Its a DELL. nuff said
2. Laptops aren't exactly meant for gaming. (excluding Voodoo's and the like) They're meant for BUSINESS type applications. You're not going to find a decent video chipset on a laptop geared towards MS Word.

Video card is most likely the bottleneck on that machine... even a 2 GHz Celery will run D3 at a good clip with a halfway-decent video card installed. But a 2 GHz Celery machine isn't going to come with anything other than sucky integrated video.

D3 may be old, but it's also less efficient than other games of the same generation, and does tend to abuse hardware.

If you treat a machine well, you can still get a lot out of old hardware - personally I've played the HL2 demo on this P3 667 (still thinking about the full version, but anyway) and got playable framerates. Guild Wars is playable also. Descent 3 usually is, but it does depend on the level.