[plug] OT: Celeron vs Athlon

[Dennis Plester]

Kai wrote:

"I've been reading the questions about Celeron vs Duron....but I'd like to
know if it's worth sending the extra $150 or so to buy an Athlon over a
Duron.
Any comments are appreciated !"

It's a case of how you value money and sheer maximum available clockspeed.
Over the last couple of months, it looks like AMD have started slowly moving
towards a spread market, where the Durons go from 700 - 850, and the Athlons
from 800 upwards. Each time the Durons go one higher, the slowest Athlon
drops out of the race, if you catch my meaning. When you compare a Duron and
Athlon side by side at the same clock speed, there is only a marginal
difference, due mainly to the different levels of cache. The Durons allow a
much cheaper entry at $120 for a CPU, but you will need to go Athlon to get
much above 800, unless you resort to overclocking of course! Even with that
though, the Durons reach an absolute limit of 1050 MHz with fairly radical
overclocking methods, where the naturally aspirated Athlons get to 1.2 G or
so anyway...

I went Duron because I had a very tight cash window, which Duron and m/board
could fit through, but the Athlon couldn't...The $150 difference paid for a
fair chunk of the new motherboard.

My 2c.

Dennis.