Hi All.

I am looking for a new computer and the one I was looking at had an Intel Celeron chip. The salesman tried directing me to a more expensive Pentium 3 chip saying that the Celeron could not handle the processing for renderings in Poser. That the Pentium was better than the Celeron.

Can anyone advise me if one is better than the other or if the Celeron will work ok? Specific: Mobil Celeron Processor 1.8GHz with 256K Cache. The machine will have 256MB DDR SDRAM.

Thanks, Dennis (DrOsborn)

Celeron is best if just doing spreadsheet, word type stuff. Would go with Intel with Intel board (no overclocking to speak of, but unless you can basically build your own computer - you dont want to deal with overclocking). If you are comfortable with buying online - I have bought over 20 computers from http://www.cyberpowersystem.com/ and have not had any problems except when I strayed to non-intel motherboards to overclock! Prices are very good. Would definitely spend the money on possible 2nd monitor and definitely memory... My 1.8 on Intel motherboard with 512mem is almost as fast as my 2.8 with 1.gig mem. Of course, using P4 on 1.8 and P5 on 2.8 so a bit different software usage... Good luck

in other words, for 3D Graphics stuff, the full PIII is measurably better than the Celeron. After all, why do you think the Celeron is cheaper?

So this was a laptop, not a PC right? Why else does it have a Mobile Celeron... Definetly stay away from the Celeron, it is a low cost business processor not designed for 3D apps, or intensive graphics work. If you have a choice... for an AMD Athlon. Cost savings might be equivalent to the Celeron, and frankly... the Athlon smokes the P4 for my money. And 256 MB of RAM is barely enough to run WINXP IMHO. 512MB or more is a must best, e.d.

Celerons have a much smaller on-die cache. This means that when a large amount of data needs to be procesed (when rendering) the processor gets smaller chunks of the data to process. Meaning that it wastes cycles swapping data in and out of the cache. Most programs are not adversly affected by this, but anything that needs heavy processor usage is much slower on a celeron than on a pentium. A celeron can handle the processing for rendering, it's just going to be slower than with a pentium.

Go for an AMD or Pentium chip if you can. I hate to admit it, but my husband's AMD 1.8 seriously smokes out my P4 2.2 on rendering speed. Anything else, and mine is faster, but Poser really seems to like AMDs. And, totally OT, why the hell does my laptop keep dropping keys and making me tap em twice? Grr. Also, when deciding on RAM, push for a single stick of 512. You get better upgrading options that way. DDR can still be a little delicate, so if you add more, go with a Crucial stick and they guarantee and will replace without any problems.

DrOsborn,Pentiums are better than Celerons...AMD is superb. I render large scenes for print with Poser and Vue d'Esprit...I work with over 100mg files in Photoshop7and Painter7.Never have any of the problems with freezes,error messages,crashes,and all the strange things that fill the forum.......I have a Celeron. If you can afford it get the AMD or Pentium,they are better..but if you can't..don't worry,you don't render with "spec sheets". SWAMP

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A Celeron will definitely do the job, but yes, it is slower. I don't know why someone would try to sell you a Pentium 3?! If you're talking about a desktop, you want a Pentium 4, or a good AMD chip. Personally I'm looking at AMDs. They're cheaper, yet still do the job very well.

A Celeron is slower because it has almost no L2 cache (sort of an on-chip RAM buffer that is loads faster than your usual RAM.) Since Poser and such are very CPU-intensive, Celerons are going to bog down under the weight of, say, Poser 5 (Poser 4 doesn't do so hot either.) Running Poser 5 on a Celeron is sort of like asking a Suzuki Samauri driver to run a level 5 off-road trail at Moab, Utah... the result gets real ugly, real fast. IOW, you simply don't send an econoboxed "ess-ewe-vee" to go do a Jeep's job, just like you don't want to demand that a Celeron behave like a Pentium 3 or 4 processor ;) You're better off getting the full deal, and if it's money you're looking to save, getting an AMD Athlon processor (err, not Duron, Athlon - for pretty much the same reasons you don't want a Celeron.) HTH, /P

Was this person also selling AMDs? Was he even selling P4s? What was he NOT selling worries me. It doesnt sound like you were in a shop that didnt have a lot of old stock to delete.

The Celerons that are currently out are generally running faster than most of the PIII's. Most of the systems out there are P4's. I'm really wondering exactly what he was trying to sell you. I would look at an AMD instead myself, lower priced motherboard and chip, which would allow you to beef up your ram for approximately the same price, and get a faster processor generally as well. Also make sure that there is a video card and not a video chip. Most of the Intel boards have a shared video/system ram chip on board.