Antiques Roadshow: PIII Tualatins

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matt2971

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Yeah I know I'm taking you all back to the dark ages here.... don't laugh, but:

If - transported in time back to 2002 - you had a choice between running one of these two systems, mainly for web, P2P, music and video, which would you prefer?

Celeron III Tualatin - 1.4ghz, 256 L2 cache, 100mhz FSB

OR

Pentium III Tualatin - 1.1ghz, 256 L2 cache, 133mhz FSB


You see, with those final PIII Tualatins, the Celeron model was nothing less than a Pentium with it's FSB crippled; so what I'm really asking is the age-old question that's still relevant today: how many less CPU speed is a bigger bus worth sacrificing? In this case, is 300mhz a valid sacrifice for 33mhz extra FSB?

Just to clarify, my mobo and RAM are 133mhz, so I'll be getting the full benefit.

In true antique tradition.... answers on a postcard please ;)
 
I think the Pentium III Is better, the multiplier on the Celeron is 14, thats rather high. Though th cache is the same, wait for more opinions.
 
Welcome to Techspot :wave: ! I would go with the P3, due to the higher fsb, and the fact that celerons are terrible processors (for gamers anyway) even with the same L2 cache. Although I'm not the biggest expert, so someone may come in and banish what I have to say.
 
Thanks for the replies so far. My understanding was that - unlike other celerons - the processors are the same for the Tualatin. They just crippled it by lowering the FSB, so don't be prejudiced by the celery name tag!

Here's the details of each:

Celeron:

http://processorfinder.intel.com/Details.aspx?ProcFam=0&sSpec=SL64V&OrdCode=

Pentium:

http://processorfinder.intel.com/details.aspx?sSpec=SL5GQ

Confirmation on what I said:

http://www.geek.com/procspec/intel/pentium3tualatincel.htm

F1N3ST, I see the multiplier on the Pentium is 8.5, compared to 14 - as you rightly said - on the Celeron. I'm only just getting au fait with understanding processors and boards - so sorry if this is a dumb question, but how does the multiplier affect speed?
 
Well, my last celeron D had a 22x multiplier, which is rather retarted. Maybe you could buy both, and benchmark compare or something, then return one or keep both. But the clock speed is multiplier X FSB, the Pentium Has a 33% FSB advantage, and the Celeron has a 22% clock advantage, so theoretially the Pentium would be better.
 
All Celerons are simply crippled versions of existing processor architecture. The original Celerons were based upon the P2 architecture, and since the Mendocino were a modified P3 architecture to simply disable half the L2 cache.

There is no architectural difference, within generations, between a Pentium and its Celeron brethren, up to and including Celeron D.

In this case, the Celeron will give you better performance when doing CPU intensive tasks. However, that's the only area in which you have the advantage. The higher FSB of the P3 will enable it to communicate with memory much faster, which will impact the system as a whole. A 33% boost that affects every transaction the CPU makes to memory is superior to a 27% boost to operations on the CPU itself. Your best bet is the P3 here.

You won't have much success overclocking the Celeron to use a 133MHz FSB, because the Tualatin architecture hits a pretty hard wall above 1.4GHz.

If you really wanted to deck that system out, you could find a PIII-S, which would put both of those CPUs to shame.
 
Thanks for the advice soul harvester; that all makes sense to me. I'll try the PIII as my first choice.

I have actually also secured one of the PIII-S models that you mention - the 1.266mhz version - that has 512mb L2. The only thing with this is that it's not compatible with my Via Apollo Pro 133T board. Apparently the server version of the Tualatin PIII requires a specfic chipset. Unfortunately I've been unable to discover for sure exactly what type or models I need, but I think one of the chipsets I can use is the Intel 815E.

On that information I've also bought an AOpen MX3S socket 370 board for this purpose. It's a Mini ATX board, but I understand this will fit in my ATX case. I'm hoping the backpane and other fittings are all compatible with the rest of my stuff, but again I don't really have a clue cos I'm new to this.

I'm gonna build this machine seperately in another case, looking at it as a bonus if I manage to get the thing to work. If not I'll be happy with using the desktop Tualatin as discussed.

Any more advice appreciated!

Matt
 
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