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I was looking at a new computer, and I can get a good computer, though it has a Celeron chip in it.

As a gamer, what is the difference?

A celery is cut back i.e. less L2 cache. Years ago they were good b/s they were extremely overclockable, but these days they are locked i believe. So now they are only good as an entry level PC. Go the full blown P4 or Athlon.

They're less expensive and generally good for a low-end computer.

Gandalf wrote:I was looking at a new computer, and I can get a good computer, though it has a Celeron chip in it.

As a gamer, what is the difference?

Generally less expensive, due to a substantially stripped L2 cache. Otherwise, the Pentium and Celeron mostly share the same core. Thanks to that smaller cache, a Celeron running at the same clock-speed as Pentium will suffer in it's performance, thanks to the reduced cache size (cache memory stores frequently accessed blocks of memory, speeding up execution times (cache memory is much, much faster than main store.))

It's the same thing with Athlons and Durons. Same core, but the Duron takes a performance hit thanks to the smaller L2 cache.

So if you want to pay less, get the Celeron. But if you want the best performance, get it's Pentium equivalent.

Hethrir wrote:A celery is cut back i.e. less L2 cache. Years ago they were good b/s they were extremely overclockable, but these days they are locked i believe. So now they are only good as an entry level PC. Go the full blown P4 or Athlon.

Well, can't you overclock using jumpers on the mobo instead?

The old Celeron 300A had a lot of headroom on it - the newer ones don't have nearly as much.

Pu-239 wrote:Well, can't you overclock using jumpers on the mobo instead?

only the cellyA's i believe. the flip chips are locked, so if you change the multiplier or FSB it will either not boot, or simply run at the chips normal speed.

AFAIK, you can still boost the FSB speed but it's multiplier-locked.