Advice on which PC is best to keep.

[Kyle]

I have been give two old computers by a friends dad who had had two brand new ones for his work. One is a AMD 2100 CPU (5years old)with 512 DDR the other is Celeron 2.8 with 512ddr. (3years old)

I am going to keep one for myself and give the other to my cousin. Which is the best PC to keep and why purely on performance?

[Ric_]

amd should be better for floating point IIRC

[Norphy]

I think in terms of CPU power they'll probably be on a rough parity with the Intel CPU edging out the AMD slightly (2100 runs at 1.7-1.8GHz iirc). However without knowing the spec of the rest of the PC, it is hard to say which will be the better machine. Which has the faster/bigger harddrive? What about the graphics system? Sound?

[Ric_]

@Norphy: The way that I understood the numbering was the equivalence to a P4 with the AMD having the extra cache and mathematical gubbins that are strippeed to make the celeron.

[Norphy]

Officially, the model numbers used by AMD were supposed to indicate how fast an Athlon running the Thunderbird arch would have to run to achieve the same level of performance. Of course, everyone knew this was bollocks and that the model numbers were supposed to emulate the P4 range.

The only difference between a P4 and a Celeron is the size of the cache and the speed of the FSB. Otherwise they're identical. No features are taken out or put in.

In terms of FPU, you're probably right in that the AXP will outperform the Celeron as the P4 line of CPUs has a very week FPU while the AXP has a very strong one (ironically built to combat the P3, the FPU in the K series chip was awful and always got thumped by the P3. How times change). However, taking everything else into account (integer performance, MMX/SSE etc) the Celeron is probably the better general purpose CPU. No matter how architecturally superior the AXP may be over the P4, it is difficult to make up a 1GHz deficit in clock speed.

I do admit that my claims about performance is all supposition and assumption, I don't have a handy AXP 2100+ or a 2.8GHz Celeron handy to benchmark against one another. However it all seems about right to me

[PeterW]

They are going to be fairly close but I would say the Celeron will edge the Athlon in most situations (probably not noticable).

[CyberNerd]

omg an AMD 2100 is 5 yrs old. where have I been

[tosca925]

5yrs and counting was my thoughts as well.

[netadmin]

I'd choose the celeron. It is a little faster, although it is not quite as good of a processor. Two years newer could mean lots less problems down the road.

[tosca925]

I guess the Celeron would be quieter as well?????

[OutToLunch]

I guess the Celeron would be quieter as well?????

That would depend entirely on what cooling fan you put on the CPU wouldn't it 'Silent' fans cost next to nothing these days...

[flyinghaggis]

I'd go for the Cereron aswell. Would be worth checking out the motherboards too to see what kind of expansion slots they have available. Likely the AMD one might only have a 4X AGP slot which might limit you in gaming performance.

[bigkevdamphouse]

Interestingly I have an AthlonXP machine at home (+2200 768mb of PC2700 RAM, 80gig 7200rpm HDD, ATi Radeon 9000PRO 256mb, DVD+-RW) and a celeron machine at work (2.6GHz, 1gig of PC3200 RAM, 80gig 720rpm HDD, ATi Radeon 7000 series 64mb, CD-ROM).

It's not a fair comparison really as has been pointed out earlier in the thread. Without benchmarking I would say that both are very similar in General Windows use. I notice that the Celeron slows when several application are open and that the Athlon only stresses when I'm running Access queries and iTunes along with all of the usual office and internet stuff. Obviously the Athlon wins on the Games front as well.

I've replaced the motherboard on the Athlon and Socket A boards are getting thin on the ground. Add that to the hassle of getting Microsoft to believe that you aren't moving XP onto a new PC and I'd be tempted to go for the Celeron. I used to be a processor snob but I'm quite happy with my work machine. Add some more RAM and application hangs get less and less.

Hope this helps.

BigK