Building A rig for a friend

[Chris_F]

My friend needs me to build him a PC. He doesn't want's to spend a whole lot on this. He seems to be set on a 2Ghz Celeron. (I told him the cele CPUs have a crippled L2, but that's what he wants.)

So all I need to do know if figure out what motherboard and ram to get.

He wants a motherboard that OC well but isn't costly. And he wants to get ~3GHz out of it so I'm not sure what ram to get him.

Any help here?

[shiyan]

Nooooo.... not the celeron....

tell him that if money is tight, go with a cheap AMD TbredB + NForce 2 combo which is MUCH faster than any Celeron.

and the crippling of the L2 cache is not like with the older Durons, which were not that much slower than Athlons of the same speed, the Celeron is useless compared to P4 of same speed.

And I'm not sure you'll get a 2Ghz Celeron to 3Ghz. I simply have no idea how they overclock.

edit: looked in the CPU database. 3Ghz might be possible.

but what's the point if it's 3Ghz but still way slower than a mildly overclocked TBred?

I just checked. For the price of a 2Ghz Celeron, you can get a 2000+. I'm sure you'll get the 2000+ to run quite a bit faster than the overclocked Celeron.

Better yet, get the 1800+ or 1700+ and have some change.

[Chris_F]

I'll ask him about that, but for right now, lets keep it to the Celeron idea.

BTW, what is a 3GHz cele equivalent to as far a P4s go. 2.2GHz, 2.4GHz? j/w

[shiyan]

I'll try to have a look for that...

edit:

looks like Sandra-wise it's about a 2.7Ghz P4.

Not sure about games though. Might be quite different picture in games as cache makes quite a difference.

I'll try to have a look for that as well.

but here's the overclockers article on overclocking the 2Ghz Celeron.

unfortunately the other did not have any 3D benches.

overclocking Celeron to 3Ghz (http://www.overclockers.com/articles648/index03.asp)

this is why... a 3Ghz Celeron is like (to my rough estimate) a 1.7~1.75Ghz Northwood in games.

have a look on this page (http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/editorial/print/celeron-2000.html)

where a 3Ghz Celeron barely beats a Northwood running at 1.6Ghz in games.

[larva]

It's true, there is no point to buying a celeron for a performance/overclocking cpu. If he won't let you use the proper parts for the job tell him he's ready to build his own.

The 1700 or 1800+ AXPs are both cheap and fast, or he needs to spend the money for P4 and a good 865PE motherboard. There is no in between.

Since cost is of the issue, a good AXP setup would the NF7 with the aforementioned 1700 or 1800+. A cost effective P4 setup would be a P4-2.4c on an Abit IS7-E or Albatron 865pe. Either rig will run best with BH5 ram, the Buffalo PC3700 from newegg is the cost effective choice there.

You can clock the celeron to the moon and it will still give up fps to even a 2GHz P4 in games. The just aren't any pumpkin for this application. They make great productivity machines, but have no gaming and overclocking value.

[xcelerator]

Celeron is just queer........

[shiyan]

sorry to post this again, but I did not know this before and am quite surprised myself.

I expected the Celeron to be bad, but I did not expect it to be THIS bad.

So I repeat a 3Ghz Celeron barely beats a Northwood running at 1.6Ghz in Games.

[Chris_F]

K, I'll talk him out of it.