Stapel needs help for purchasing a new monitor

[Skyfish]

I have a P4 2.66Ghz at home and a P4 3.06GHz at work = absolutely no difference (for Civ) so dont pay the overprice !
Having played Civ on the Celeron of the little cousin = DONT buy the Celeron, not good for Civ (or DVD watching i.e) !

[Melifluous]

quote:Originally posted by Skyfish

...DONT buy the Celeron, not good for Civ (or DVD watching i.e) !

I have a Celeron 1.5Ghz on my laptop and that runs civ fine and plays DVDs..



Melifluous

[Stapel]

Civ runs fine on my PIII 600 - 192......

So, I guess I will buy the celeron and add a nice 1024 MBs of memory.

[digger760]

Can't resist but add my piece of techno bullshit:

Intel CPU's
Celeron
Pentium

the only difference is the L2 cache. It is much quicker for the CPU to store and retreive data in the L2 cache, than DDR-RAM. And Guess what the Celeron has less L2 cache (but this savs on power)

The end results is the Pentium can process quicker than the Celeron (when both have the same clock speed). The celeron consumes less power and requires less of a heatsink (and perhaps a slower fan)


AMD
Duron (i think they dont make duron anymore)
Athlon

Duron is the AMD equivalent to Celeron
Athlon is the AMD equivalent to Pentium

AMD chips have a slower clock speed, but have more L2 cache than the Intel equivalent CPU's. Because of the slower clock speed a 1.3Ghz Athlon CPU matches in perfomance a P4 1.6Ghz. AMD came up with a marketing scheme so that people would know how to compare products. So they name there Athlon CPU's as

AthlonXP 1600, 1700, 1800 and so on

the 1600 means its equivalent to a 1.6Ghz Pentium4 CPU

In General AMD CPU's and accociated motherboards are cheaper.

But it sounds like you want to stick with Dell so your stuck with Celeron or Pentium. Both will probably do ok for Civ but a pentium will mean quicker time between turns and quicker processing during larger maps.

digger760

[anarres]

Just to be in on the techie talk, our server bought last summer for testing has 2 Intel Xeon processors with (IIRC) 1Mb L2 chache and 512k of L3 cache! []

[digger760]

Yea! i dont know too much about L3 cache, maybe its just with the server CPU's such as the Xeon.

The new Penitum-M (for laptops)(also known as Centrino when matched with Intels 855 chipset and pro-wirless card) has 1Mb L2 cache and apparently a 1.7Ghz pentium-M performs about the same as a 2.5Ghz P4, which only has 512Kb L2 cache.

[Stapel]

WTF is L2 (or L3) cache? Do I need that? Is it worth 100 euros?

[anarres]

L2 cache is a small amount of storage (memory) that resides directly on the CPU itself. This does a lot of the work that would otherwise need to be done in the normal memory of your machine, and is very significant in reducing the time taken for certain CPU tasks.

L3 cache is yet another layer between the CPU and your normal memory, after the L2 cache and is only seen on *hugely* expensive chips, so I am sorry fo rconfusing the conversation with it.

As digger mentioned, the size of L2 cache is the only difference with Celerons and Pentiums, and you will notice the difference. The big question to ask is "Should I spend 'x' on a Pentium or a Celeron" - and to be honest, it depends on how much 'x' is. In your list the extra cost of a Pentium 4 is huge comparable to the Celeron, but this is mostly because you are at the high end of the market. If you were going to spend that much extra you should get a Celeron that is a lot faster, rather than a same speed Pentium. If you were looking at 1.5GHz chips (for example), the difference between Pentium and Celeron would be *much* smaller, and so the choice would be a different one.

[Stapel]

I just ordered a P IV 2.8 Ghz with 1024 Mb .

[Skyfish]

Great choice !