Intel Celeron 1.7GHz - Pentium 4 Powered

Internet Content Creation & General Usage Performance

With this review we continue to use SYSMark 2002; SYSMark 2002 can be considered to be a much more memory bandwidth intensive version of the Winstone tests. The benchmark is split into two parts, Internet Content Creation which deals with content creation applications (Photoshop, Dreamweaver, etc...) and Office Productivity which is more general usage oriented (Word, Excel, Netscape, Anti-Virus, etc...).

The 2002 update changes things around a bit; first of all the benchmark's total scores are arrived at differently than in the 2001 benchmark. Windows Media Encoder no longer accounts for close to half of the Internet Content Creation test, rather only about 10%. There is also no need for a special Athlon XP SSE patch as the 2002 suite uses a version of the encoding dll that properly detects SSE support on all Palomino cores as well as Pentium 4 cores.

The rest of the benchmark is much more evenly distributed and it is much more memory bandwidth intensive than the old benchmark. The Internet Content Creation tests on average use about 600MB/s of bandwidth vs 300MB in SYSMark 2001. The Office Productivity tests are still stuck at around 580MB/s of memory bandwidth.

For more information on the tests and the applications used consult this whitepaper provided by BAPCo.

Internet Content Creation Performance Internet Content Creation SYSMark 2002 Intel Pentium 4 2.0GHz Intel Celeron 1.7 @ 2.26GHz Intel Pentium 4 1.7GHz AMD Athlon XP 1600+ (1.40GHz) Intel Celeron 1.7GHz AMD Duron 1.3GHz Intel Pentium III 1.2 Intel Celeron 1.2GHz 233 230 208 195 193 135 128 108 | 0 | 47 | 93 | 140 | 186 | 233 | 280

Internet Content Creation is clearly not the target market for the Celeron but it does quite well, only losing out to the Pentium 4 1.7GHz by 7%. In any situation where you're constantly streaming data from main memory to the CPU without reuse, the benefits associated with a larger L2 cache are diminished. Remember that one of the major principles of caching is that data that is requested once will probably be requested again, in the case of most streaming applications this is not the case and thus we do not see such a large penalty associated with the Celeron's smaller L2 cache.

When overclocked to 2.26GHz the processor is almost as fast as the Pentium 4 2.0GHz.

General Usage Performance Office Productivity SYSMark 2002 Intel Pentium 4 2.0GHz Intel Celeron 1.7 @ 2.26GHz AMD Athlon XP 1600+ (1.40GHz) Intel Pentium 4 1.7GHz Intel Celeron 1.7GHz Intel Pentium III 1.2 AMD Duron 1.3GHz Intel Celeron 1.2GHz 137 132 125 124 110 106 104 91 | 0 | 27 | 55 | 82 | 110 | 137 | 164

The most important performance metric to look at here is the Office Productivity suite which closely mimics daily computer usage; this is where business and home users alike will notice the true performance differences between these processors. Here the Pentium 4 1.7GHz is 11% faster than the new Celeron which itself can barely outperform the 1.2GHz Pentium III. Although the Duron provides healthy competition for the new processor it is the similarly priced Athlon XP 1600+ that ends up offering the most bang for your buck here to those that are unwilling to overclock.

When pushed to 2.26GHz the new Celeron once again rises to the top, bested only by the 2GHz Pentium 4.