2.4GHZ P4 or a Celeron 3GHZ..which is better ?

Building a cheapo system for a cash strapped buddy of mine, he insists on Intel period. I can either get him a P4 2.4GHZ or a 3.06GHZ Celeron, i realize that you can get better for a bit more but to stay within his strict budget i am stuck with these 2 choices.

Which would actually be better ?

Pentium > Celeron

not sure what models of p4 2.4 and celeron you are looking at, but my guess would be that if the p4 has HT, it would be preferred.

If you are gonna try to OC, the specifics of the cpu's and mobo will come into it too.

I have a few of the northwood 2.4'c (not made anymore so they are used) and they consistently oc past 3 ghz and have HT.

If you have specific models in mind, post them here and you will be able to get a more definitive answer.

Just going off of Newegg, one is a Celeron D and the other is a 2.4A. both pretty darn cheap as far as Intels go. The cheapest Intel chip with HT is like $60 more which puts it out of his budget,

is that an 775 chip? man you should be more specific.

if its 775, go for the 506. its a 2.66ghz part, setting it to 200fsb will give you an even 4ghz.

with the prescott, you get a full 1mb of cache, over the cellies 256k ( i think its 256..,.).

Both are Socket478 and have a 533FSB and no HT but the 2.4A has 1MB L2 cache compared to the 256kB of the Celeron-D, this would always be my choice.

On the other hand I would try to get a nice 800FSB Northwood P4 with HT. This will still have twice the cache of Celeron-D, isn't bothered by the longer Prescott pipelines (bad with low core speed) and HT just makes such a system just much more responsive...

Calidan said:

Just going off of Newegg, one is a Celeron D and the other is a 2.4A. both pretty darn cheap as far as Intels go. The cheapest Intel chip with HT is like $60 more which puts it out of his budget,

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A celeron is a P4 with the L2 cache reduced to 1/4 the normal size. That's the only principle difference between the two processors you've mentioned, that being that the Celeron D has 256KB of L2 cache and the 2.4a has the full P4 1MB allotment.

Beyond that you have different multipliers. Both chips are 533FSB (133MHz) designs, so the 2.4a has a multiplier of 18 and the 3.06 C-D has a multiplier of 23. This also is a factor in favor of the 2.4a as you can very easily run 200fsb and likely run stably at the resultant 3600MHz. A real 1MB Prescott running 3.6GHz will flat smoke any Celeron.

The Celeron might run 3.6 or even 4GHz for all we know, but it doesn't really matter. Intel reduced the cache to 256KB specifically to cripple the chip, and from a benchmarking and gaming perspective they fairly well succeeded. And the relatively low fsb that results from the 23X multiplier will exaserbate the situation, as it directly hurts memory performance and the smaller cache places greater emphasis on just that.

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I would vote against buying anything socket 478 at this point. Socket 775 and agp I can understand. Other than that you should concentrate on finding an inexpensive socket 775 cpu and pcie mobo combo.

I would never buy a celeron, well not the present day ones we have right now.
However there have been a few good ones that were worth owning in the past, e.g. 300A and the Tualatin versions. Those days are long gone.

Deffinitely go with the Pentium, my 3.4 Prescott HT spanks similar Celerons!

the P 2.4a with a good motherboard (p4p800 se) will do 3.5-4 gigs easily, just no HT.