Celeron 430... Wow.

Intel doesn't talk much about its Celeron processors nowadays. They are too busy pushing their Pentium Dual Core chips in budget laptops and cheap desktops. Hell, to be honest, I didn't even know Intel still made Celeron processors.

They do. And I'll be perfectly honest; They kick total ass.

I'm not just saying this either. Before I tried a Celeron 430 last week, I hated Intel. I was such an unhappy camper after using the Pentium D 805, I swore to myself I was never going to touch an Intel processor again.

And I probably wouldn't have, if I couldn't have bought one of these Conroe based Celerons for $22 on ebay (Although in all honesty, I was going to buy a Celeron 420 from NewEgg for $43).

I can hardly find any information about these processors on the internet, and that's really a damn shame considering these things have been out since June. Everybody is all about multicore chips nowadays, but the Celeron 4XX is a true single core chip.

The Celeron 4XX series isn't just a Conroe based Core 2 Duo with one of its cores disabled, its actually a true one core processor. The chips run on a 800 mhz FSB and have 512K of L2 cache. Some people on NewEgg bitch about the lack of L2 cache in their reviews, but I don't have a problem with it; my Athlon X2 4400+ only has 512K of L2 cache per core.

When I bought the Celeron 430, I was not expecting much. I bought a motherboard for $30 and figured I would only use the system to run Mac OS X over a weekend or two before I packed the CPU and board up and sold them on eBay. I figured that the performance would totally suck, and at first I actually was going to cancel the motherboard order and just try and resell the processor on eBay.

The CPU and motherboard sat unopened for about a week before I was interested in trying the processor out. I put the board in an old case with a 300 watt Antec power supply, a 1gb stick of RAM from my Athlon system, and an old 40gb IDE hard drive that contained Mac OS X 10.4.8.

After putting the system up I booted it up, and went into the BIOS. Despite being a $30 motherboard, I could actually overclock the system by setting the bus speed. The default was 200 times a multiplier of 9 which yielded 1800 mhz. For shits and giggles I set the bus speed to 260 and restarted the system. I figured the system wouldn't boot, and I would have to reset the BIOS jumper.

I couldn't believe the system booted. With no problems whatsoever, either. Boom, right out of the box my 1.8ghz Celeron was operating at 2378mhz, or as I round up, 2.4 ghz. A freaking 33% speed increase!




I was amazed by this number, especially since after several tests the system barely ran any hotter. In fact the system when 33% overclocked was still running cooler than my Athlon X2 4400 system.

Runnong OS X on the machine was totally responsive. Never before had I used an OS X machine that ran so smoothly. I bought an Intel Mac Mini Core Solo last year, and sold it within a month because the performance was horrendous. The Celeron 430 however was amazing.



It wasn't long before I installed Windows XP on the machine and did some tests. After I saw the test results, I quickly moved the Celeron and motherboard into my regular computer case and put the Athlon X2 4400+ and its board into my closet.


SuperPi



This was the test that I couldn't believe! My Pentium D 805 took a minute to calculate Pi to a million places. I was amazed when my Athlon X2 4400 did it in 39 seconds. I was completely speechless when this budget processor completed the task in 29 seconds; a full ten second lead from a processor that I paid four times as much.

Geekbench





I've come to accept the fact that Geekbench gives totally different scores on the same hardware depending on what OS is used. When Geekbench is run on the Celeron 430 @ 2.4 ghz in Windows XP, it gets a score of 2040. Not bad considering my dual core Athlon X2 4400+ manages to get a score of 2428 at stock speed (2.3ghz).

So what did I learn? I learned that Intel is still making single core processors, and that Core based CPUs really kick ass. AMD can kick the shit out of Intel's Netburst based processors, but I think they are going to have a hard time fighting off Core based processors.

I just wished I would have given Intel another chance before I bought my AMD Athlon X2 system. Damn, I could only imagine the results of an overclocked Core 2 Duo.

I'm sorry Intel.

So a while back, I bitched about Intel and how I was never going to buy another one of their processors because of the horrible experience I had with the Pentium D 805. I was really happy with my Athlon X2 4400+ system, but the problem was I just couldn't find it in myself to love Windows Vista.

Lets face it; Windows Vista is the biggest load of operating shit the world has ever seen. I thought my system with 2gb of 800 mhz DDR2 RAM would be able to run Vista, but for some damn reason Vista seemed to always want to access my hard drive (YES I TURNED SEARCH INDEXING OFF!) for some unknown reason.

I was back to using good old Windows XP but I quickly realized that I wanted to try something different. Linux was out of the question, because well frankly, everytime I install any kind of distro what so ever, it always fails to boot within a month (I do something to screw up the settings, and the window manager doesn't load, so I'm stuck with a command prompt and I'm too damn lazy to learn Linux).

Then I got this brilliant idea of using OS X on my machine. I actually owned some recent Macs in the recent years, and actually enjoy using the OS X software. My problem is I have always had a problem with the hardware. If it wasn't for the shitty hardware experience, I would most likely be using a nice iMac C2D today, but instead now I am just using OS X on generic hardware. I could write ten pages of whether its legal or not (its not legal), but I'll do that some other time.

So back to the whole OS X story. To make a long story short, OS X wouldn't play friendly on my AMD system. My onboard nVidia graphics didn't work, my sound didn't work, and a bunch of other things probably didn't work (my wireless network card did however work with a bit of tweaking).

I did some research, and it seemed that the solution was to buy a Intel processor and an Intel chipset motherboard. Mac OS X ran very nice on my Pentium D system, so I figured I would purchase a cheap Conroe based Celeron processor, and a cheap motherboard despite my new found hatred towards Intel.

I didn't realize how awesome the Core 2 platform really is. I managed to buy a Celeron 430 CPU off of eBay for a mere $20 and a Intel 945gz based Biostar motherboard off of NewEgg for $30. I took the 2gb of 800mhz DDR2 memory from my AMD system and threw it into the board (It only operated at 533mhz though.. bummer) and overclocked the processor upto 2.4ghz with no problems (I had to literally fight with my Athlon X2 4400+ to overclock it sucessfully, and I was using a somewhat expensive motherboard!)

So why am I using the Celeron 430 now instead of the Athlon X2 4400 as my main system? Its not all about me running OS X... the Celeron 430 when OC'ed is actually a pretty damn good processor that almost fully puts my dual core Athlon to shame!

More details later!

I want to update.

Geez I really want to keep up with this blog! I have a couple posts I typed up and just need to post, and I also have a shitload of new stuff to write about (including about how Intel's Celeron 430 processor kicks the shit out of my Athlon X2 4400+ in SuperPi)

Scary thought; I was logging into my Blogger account and took a minute to look at the blogs that were updated within the past minute. Amongst the updated, "Enema Erotica". I thought I was strange for writing about computer hardware..