Intel Pentuim III (sl52q) or Celeron (sl6w4)

R∑BEL · 2 May 2011 at 22:32

Hey guys,
Im building a quick simple pc for my little sis to do her home work on from some old spare parts i have collected, instead of hogging and vandalising my £900 laptop.

I got a choice of a prescott 800 mother board with a Intel Celeron SL6W4 processor
or a Gygabite GA60-XT board and Pentuim III SL52Q cpu.

Windows Vista Ultimate
40gb Maxtor HDD
40gb WD caviar HDD for storage.
2x 512mb Ram

I dont kno the ins and outs of boards and CPU's so would like some advice please.

(Not = Buy a new PC!!!)

Thanks.

mraerosmith1981 · 2 May 2011 at 22:53

well since the celeron should be a 2.4, and the p3 is 933mhz, I would go for the celeron

PermaBanned · 2 May 2011 at 23:03

mraerosmith1981 said:
well since the celeron should be a 2.4, and the p3 is 933mhz, I would go for the celeron

It might not be that clear cut, old Celerons are a lot worse than Pentiums.

I wouldn't expect either of them to run Vista, however...

R∑BEL · 2 May 2011 at 23:05

The celeron is in at the moment and runnig vista fine if not a wee bit slow for my liking.

Cheers

PermaBanned · 2 May 2011 at 23:10

Whatever you go for it is definitely worth looking into Linux, would run a lot better on that sort of hardware and is often easier for people to learn (not sure how old she is?). See:

https://meego.com/
http://www.linuxmint.com/

Then you can easily get Office software, like LibreOffice, for free and let her use the software center for everything else without having to worry about dodgy downloads or viruses.

andy_mk3 · 2 May 2011 at 23:49

Well the P3 has twice as much L2 cache, but the clock speeds are hugely different.

I know (from experience) that the Celeron processors are pretty awful, but they run XP or Linux fairly nicely. I wouldn't even consider Vista though.

If it was me I'd use the Celeron, the P3 is better suited for Win 98/ME really.

Of course you can always try both if you have the time to compare them.

panyan · 2 May 2011 at 23:58

Superewza said:
I wouldn't expect either of them to run Vista, however...

+1 perhaps a striped out netbook version would be snappier

bremen1874 · 3 May 2011 at 00:25

Do you have any money to throw at the problem?

If you do then a 3.0GHz HT P4 available for < £15 might be worth considering.

Upping the memory to 2GB would help things along if you're stuck with Vista. The cost would depend on what the motherboard supports.

40GB drives are probably fairly old. A small modern drive would be noticeably quicker (and potentially more reliable).

bru · 3 May 2011 at 00:25

closest comparison i could find and even then its the 1ghz Pentium 3 not the 933mhz version

Tom's Hardware - Benchmark old comparison

the celeron is miles faster in allot of things but then only just faster in others.
personally i would use the celeron maybe even with a mild overclock and use xp rather than vista or better still win 7 starter

darael · 3 May 2011 at 06:37

I'd use the Celeron, and overclock it.

chrisarm · 3 May 2011 at 09:11

I agree with panyan maybe look for a stripped down netbook version of windows 7 (should be easy to find) and run it on the celeron. If not go back to XP, I found vista a tad power hungry.