Bang for the Buck, comparing Celerons to Xeons (and PIIIs?)

[Alan DuBoff]

alan@webwidgets.net wrote:

> Now another interesting thing (to me at least) would be the price/speed
> ratio. In other words, the Xeons are ~20% faster than the Celerons;
> just comparing the CPU's and motherboards (since this is where the
> major differences in the machines appear to be) how much more do you
> have to pay to get that 20% increase in performance?

Well, that was the whole point of buying the dual Celeron box to begin with.
The cost was about $4k for the dual Xeon box, and it was about $1.5k for the
Celerons.

The Celerons are a good bang for the buck, but not as "industrial" as the
Xeons. It all depends on what you are doing with it. The ability to SMP the
Celerons is not something that Intel is fond of, and ABit would need to be
given credit for accomplishing it on the motherboard. A Japanese gent was the
person to discover it only required the enabling of a pin, which I've heard
rumors that Intel is cutting off completely from the newer Celerons.

In general, overclocking and SMP of Celerons is not something that the average
person should be doing, but I wanted a hot rod. The Xeons cost $1k each, and 2
Celerons with high performance heatsinks/fans and the ABit BP6 mobo cost about
$500, so you can do the math as easy as I can.

I have a Matrox G400 video controller in my dual Celeron box with 32mb of
memory on it. It's running Debian potato with XFree86 3.9.15 (pre-4.0) and
looks wonderful at 1600x1200x32. It's got an iiyama VisionMaster Pro 450 (19"
monitor) on it with the newer flat DiamondTron tube in it (Mitsubishi built
trinitron tube which is licensed from Sony). That is a great montior for the
$675 street price it goes for these days. BTW, the prices above are without
any monitors.

-- 

Alan DuBoff
Software Orchestration, Inc.