The $42 Intel CPU: Celeron G6900 Review

[Ben Myers]

"low budget office use." With that phrase, you are doing a world-class job of perpetuating the myth that people working in an office do not need a lot of computing horsepower. With even a low-salaried office worker, say a pathetic $20000 annually, the cost of a thousand dollar computer is only 5% of the worker's salary, but that thousand dollars can be leveraged into far more productive work hours, compared to cheap hardware that would have one of these Celeron CPUs.

What you've done here is feed into the mindset of company owners and beancounters who have made penny-wise and pound foolish investments in their employees for decades.

My own experience with a worst case scenario is as follows. The owner of a small company overloads his laptop, limited capacity, with spreadsheets, documents, PDFs and tens of browser tabs, then complains when the laptop does not work well. But he is too darn cheap to recognize that a $2000 investment in a top-class laptop would make his most valuable and highly salaried employee far more productive than he is today.

On the other hand, I would expect the Celeron G6900 to be useful in a system seeing low use and needing low bandwidth and maybe a touch screen instead of a keyboard, for example an automated teller machine.

 

[Fastturtle]

The new Celeron isn't for Gamers or anyone needing more then basic office software. It would be interesting to see how well it performs with many of the common apps used by a large business such as Data Entry, Email, Word and such as it's either aimed at that market or the embedded withere you don't need much CPU such as a Synology or Qnap storage NAS.

 

[Tantor]

Steve, thanks for the very good review, it's why I keep coming back to Techspot.

 

[BadThad]

I'll tell you who it's for - cheap PC/laptop manufacturers. It will find it's way into some very low level computers that will be bought by ignorant consumers based on price.

Great article, I can appreciate the amount of work that went into this test. GOOD JOB!

 

[Shirley Dulcey]

"there are much better alternatives for essentially the same price."
you forgot to mention those $42 CPUs you can buy today instead of this one
your affiliate links showing double the price so we really do not know what you are talking about in the article?
"Given you can buy the Core i3 processor for $85 right now, it makes the G6900 very hard to justify for just $10 less," in what universe is $85 just 10 more than $42?
in Europe the 12100F is 85%-100% more expensive than G6900

As the article points out, the current street price of the G6900 is $75. That's $10 less than the $85 street price of the 10100F. The G6900 might make a bit more sense if you could actually buy it for $42, especially for non-gaming systems that are not going to get a GPU -- note that like all F-series processors, the 10100F does not have an iGPU, so it will cost a lot more to build a 10100F-based system.

 

[defaultluser]

It boggles the mind that, ten years after Intel introduced the dual-core celeron, were still stuck on that same page!

In that same time period, the core i3 has doubled it's core/thread count, and the Pentium has added both ht and a high-end IGP cut!


To me,tthe most embarrassing part of all this? the fact that Windows 11 requires 4 threads! this easy spec change could have massively lowered the cost-of-entry (8 years ago, I had a friend build a budget gaming system with a Celeron - that's no longer viable in any way!)

 

[PoweredByJenga]

These are now $69 AUD from a number of sites in Australia. This compares to the 10105 (non F) at $179. The issue is that the $69 part comes with a GPU (of a lesser kind) and the F versions of 10100 and 10105 don't. So this step is not an extra $10 as mentioned by Steve.

 

[PoweredByJenga]

It boggles the mind that, ten years after Intel introduced the dual-core celeron, were still stuck on that same page!

In that same time period, the core i3 has doubled it's core/thread count, and the Pentium has added both ht and a high-end IGP cut!


To me,tthe most embarrassing part of all this? the fact that Windows 11 requires 4 threads! this easy spec change could have massively lowered the cost-of-entry (8 years ago, I had a friend build a budget gaming system with a Celeron - that's no longer viable in any way!)

They should at least roll down the 4 cores to Pentiums and make the Celeron a 2c/4t

 

[hwertz]

This CPU looks dreadful. I've dealt with this before -- "Lets keep the CPU clock low", "AND disable hyperthreading" (can't help), "AND give it slow RAM and low cache" (ensuring low performance per clock as well as being low-clocked.) Sure makes sure that performance is abysmal!

Just to note, there are some dual cores that are not this bad -- I have a Acer now with a Core i3-1115G4 system right now, dual core, but with hyper-threading. I didn't expect much, the Dell I had before started acting up unexepctedly and I had to replace it on a tight budget. This had a Ryzen 3050U with Zen2+ in it (quad-core). Since this Core i3-1115G4 will boost each core up to over 4ghz, it's no slouch, it's actually very close to the quad-core I had previously in terms of actual performance, and it's about 75-80% the performance of the quad-core version of the same Core I3 (since the quad-core i3 would only boost the cores up to like 2.7ghz or so.)

Shockingly, (perhaps due to the excellent state of the Intel drivers in Linux), the FPS is very close between the Intel onboard whatever versus the AMD GPU in the Ryzen too.

 

[zavalita2002]

What are you talking about? My 4 year old Ryzen 1300x is faster than this useless garbage

Unfortunately, 1300x (4C/4T) performance on single core is atrocious, and that's apparrent on regular tasks - booting Windows, browsing, gaming, office etc, and a good 30% under G900. The multicore score is better, but I'm not a video editor or a ZIP nut case. Latency is atrocious, so no serious gaming either. The particular problems of the Zen 1 Gen (motherboards, RAM) are just icing on the cake. Yes, they kinda solved them through BIOS updates over a looong period of the time and now you can even pair Ryzen 3000 CPU's with a X370 board, but AMD is still non-existent on the low-end of the market and it keeps being beaten on the middle and high-end part of it at the price/performance ratio.

 

[zavalita2002]

With all due respect this is a dreadful review. The reviewer has assumed we will be using it to game with which is absurd, compared it to much more expensive CPUs and gone "see look it doesnt game its bad". But theres no comparison to products in its own price range and no comparison to older systems that this thing could replace. The next cheapest product on this test is more than twice the price. People arent buying a celeron to game on, there are dozens of potential applications but that isnt one of them. In my old office we had a celeron machine next a printer. I know someone who uses one as a minecraft server. Is this thing capable of being used in a media PC? So many unanswered questions.

Where I live the Athlon 220GE is a mere £10 more than the G6900, it would have been nice to find out which is faster at what you might use these things for which means not gaming!

Same multi-core perf, but, as always, 30% more on a single core tests - and that's what matters in real life. The Athlon is a 35 W chip vs 46 W, though.

 

[toooooot]

I used a celeron once. In my entire life I used mid to high tier cpus.
So this one time I decided to get a celeron for a small backup pc.
It was pure pain. I did not realize how much cpus do for a pleasing work.
You should never buy one if you like confort.

 

[zavalita2002]

I used a celeron once. In my entire life I used mid to high tier cpus.
So this one time I decided to get a celeron for a small backup pc.
It was pure pain. I did not realize how much cpus do for a pleasing work.
You should never buy one if you like confort.

I also have a laptop with a Celeron from 10 years ago. I agree, it IS pure pain.
Nonetheless, Celerons from the last 2 generations are ok at the right price, and the single core performance shames any offerigns AMD might have. And remember, the casual user only needs single core tasks - including browsing with many tabs being open at once.