[plug] Celeron vs Duron

[Dennis Plester]

A general question, but perhaps with still a Linux slant.

A friend of mine currently has a Celeron 400 running on a BX chipset
motherboard, and is currently considering his upgrade options. They are
either to upgrade to a Celeron 700 on the same board for approx $200, versus
selling the board and CPU, and then shelling out approximately $375 - 400 to
purchase a Duron 700 and suitable motherboard.

Web reviews and magazine articles infer that the Duron leaves the Celeron
well behind in all benchmarks. The Celeron 700 still runs at a 66 MHz front
bus speed, whereas the Duron runs at 100 as far as I understand, and
supposedly has stronger floating point and integer math than the Celeron to
boot.

My friend runs Windows exclusively, but wants to investigate Linux. He
primarily plays games, and surfs the net. His system does not have any
exotic hardware, just the basic sound card, 2D/3D video card (Geforce) and
IDE harddrives, CDROM and CDRW. He previously had a real bad experience with
a K6-2 plus, with its crap floating point letting him down in the 3D gaming
department, so the word AMD tends to still put a shiver down his spine!

Based on plug members experiences, is the Duron the potent but cheap
processor it appears to be? Are there any incompatibility issues that affect
Linux in particular?

Any comments would be appreciated. If any Duron owners out there reply,
could you indicate your motherboard model as well please?

Thanks

Dennis.