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.
