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Very Surprised, Intel Celeron G530 2.40GHz Socket LGA 1155

Soldato
Joined
7 Aug 2004
Posts
11,297
So I bought one of these as a stop gap for my living room gaming PC, and to do some testing with other boards etc, I always had in my mind to get an i5 to game with which I bought last week.

Anyways I sorted out the PC this weekend and just for a laugh I tried to run some games on it (rest of PC spec is a H67 ITX board and a 6970 2GB, 8gb corsair ram, running 1080p)

Ran: F1 2011, Alien Vs Pred DX11, kerbal space program.

Ya know what....the games ran very very very well indeed, more than playable - the only slight stutter was on kerbal - which is basically alpha code so no probs there.

Of course once I start running BF3, I expect it to struggle there, but..

Are we obsessed as a community on silly price processors?, im so surprised these games ran smooth as butter - now of course its mostly down to the graphics cards these days, but wow :eek:, I managed get hold of a 3.2ghz i5 for £100 so will be placing that in, but im keeping the celeron processor in my computer bits box, it does very well indeed :)

I didn't bench it - because the games ran smooth and all games were at there maxed out settings, maybe I have paid to much attention to benchies in the past, instead of just doing what the pc was designed to do - play the games! lol
 
Yeah dual core processors can still hold a candle to Quads and above :) a celeron is basically an i3 with out HT enabled and we all know how decently the i3's can play games and other tasks ^.^
 
Similar experience when I bought the e2140 when it was released for around £40-50. Apart from you could clock them upto 2.8-3.2

My housemate has a cheap 775 foxconn board and he had an awful celeron e1200 in it.Chucked it out and bought an e5300 off the bay for £20. I fsb modded it to 3.45ghz and with my old 4870 at 1680x1050 I've given him all the crysis titles. It play crysis 2 and bfc2 really well. Will be upgrading 2 family members pcs soon they are both single core skt 939's. So I think a couple g540/g630's will do the job.
 
I changed my HTPC from an AMD Phenom II 850 (really an Athlon X4 at 3.3GHz) and 8GB DDR2 to a SandyBridge setup - mainly to free up the AMD setup for a mate and partially to save some power. I couldn't decide between the G540 and an i3, I really didn't want to struggle for anything and was worried the G540 wouldn't cut it. In the end I went with a G530 temporarily to see how far from useable it was and then decide whether to get the Pentium or the i3, sell on the Celeron for £5-£10 loss.

The little Celeron has really, really surprised me. It's teamed up with a 6450 I already had and it's not struggled AT ALL. I don't game on the HTPC, it's purely to watch TV/films/etc and share it's 4 tuners with 3 extenders around the house. I haven't noticed any slowdown at all, and even boot time was the same as the AMD. Combine this with 40W less at peak, 20W less at idle and normal usage and I couldn't be happier.

Fantastic little chip, just wish the name "Celeron" didn't still have the stigma from the poor socket 775 chips, so I always call it a G530 rather than a Celeron G530. :D
 
I changed my HTPC from an AMD Phenom II 850 (really an Athlon X4 at 3.3GHz) and 8GB DDR2 to a SandyBridge setup - mainly to free up the AMD setup for a mate and partially to save some power. I couldn't decide between the G540 and an i3, I really didn't want to struggle for anything and was worried the G540 wouldn't cut it. In the end I went with a G530 temporarily to see how far from useable it was and then decide whether to get the Pentium or the i3, sell on the Celeron for £5-£10 loss.

The little Celeron has really, really surprised me. It's teamed up with a 6450 I already had and it's not struggled AT ALL. I don't game on the HTPC, it's purely to watch TV/films/etc and share it's 4 tuners with 3 extenders around the house. I haven't noticed any slowdown at all, and even boot time was the same as the AMD. Combine this with 40W less at peak, 20W less at idle and normal usage and I couldn't be happier.

Fantastic little chip, just wish the name "Celeron" didn't still have the stigma from the poor socket 775 chips, so I always call it a G530 rather than a Celeron G530. :D

You will be fine with that mate ! lol, just been playing F1 2011 again at 1920x1080, sure it gets close to 30fps when tons on the screen but most of the time its fine! :)
 
I have to agree, great little chips. My girlfriend has one in her PC along with my old GTX280 and it's been quite happy with everything we've thrown at it
 
Intel would have complete dominance if they unlocked the line ups for the enthusiast sector.
Kind of think that's why they don't.

Its because the pentiums and celerons would be too much competition for their own higher end cpu's when overclocked.
A 4.8Ghz sandybridge for 45quid? yes please. But not happening.
 
So I bought one of these as a stop gap for my living room gaming PC, and to do some testing with other boards etc, I always had in my mind to get an i5 to game with which I bought last week.

Anyways I sorted out the PC this weekend and just for a laugh I tried to run some games on it (rest of PC spec is a H67 ITX board and a 6970 2GB, 8gb corsair ram, running 1080p)

Ran: F1 2011, Alien Vs Pred DX11, kerbal space program.

Ya know what....the games ran very very very well indeed, more than playable - the only slight stutter was on kerbal - which is basically alpha code so no probs there.

Of course once I start running BF3, I expect it to struggle there, but..

Are we obsessed as a community on silly price processors?, im so surprised these games ran smooth as butter - now of course its mostly down to the graphics cards these days, but wow :eek:, I managed get hold of a 3.2ghz i5 for £100 so will be placing that in, but im keeping the celeron processor in my computer bits box, it does very well indeed :)

I didn't bench it - because the games ran smooth and all games were at there maxed out settings, maybe I have paid to much attention to benchies in the past, instead of just doing what the pc was designed to do - play the games! lol


i do believe in what you say....two and a half years ago i was running a pc with an old pentium 4 single core and a high end graphics card and i could run any game almost maxed out and they ran and looked great......people would not believe me at the time when i spoke about it in forums as they were all using the core 2 duo;s.....iv now got a high end comp spending over £2000.00 so far on it , but i do wonder sometimes if we really do need all this power,i only game at 1920/1200 as i dont see the point going higher,so i guess other than changing graphics cards every three years it should last a while..

at the moment i got a single gtx680 ivybridge i7 at 4.50 so it should last.
 
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I'd love to build a cheap little £350 quid gaming rig, sadly dont have the money after just building a £1500 behemoth :(
 
this is good news! i'm very close to buying a G530/G540 for a media/web browsing rig.
Thanks to OP for sharing!
 
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