Wow. It's been four or so months since I last updated this blog! I haven't had a lot of cash to waste on computer products (I quit working full time to go back to school full time.. bummer) but I still managed to save enough moolah up to purchase a laptop (a Dell Inspiron 1525 for school) and am getting ready to go back to AMD for my desktop solution.
I just sold the Celeron 430 processor I bought several months ago for $20 to some guy on eBay for $35. I also plan to sell a Geforce 7300gs graphics card, and the Biostar socket 775 intel motherboard, and use the money to build a cheap AMD machine.
Why?
Well besides having an Intel Pentium Dual Core cpu in my laptop, I'm done with Mac OS X and the 430. The only reason I purchased the 430 was to be able to run OS X, but alas I grew tired of OS X and have moved on to bigger and better things (Okay, so now I am into Linux.. don't blame me, blame college professors that think you should have a firm grasp of Linux if you're trying to get your Master's degree in computer science).
But now, it's time for another look at the Celeron 430 processor. I made a big stink about it a couple months ago (because, well, I only paid $20 for it), but now that stink is really not a big deal, especially when the damn thing is still going for $50+ on the retail market.
Now it's time for another review of the processor.. and I hate to say it, but I don't really like the Conroe based processor any more. Why? Well, because of a few things.
The price, $50 is just not worth it. I guess I was rather lucky to obtain one for $20 several months ago, but if you are actually planning on purchasing one of these bad boys for $50, then you really have to think about this. Pentium Dual Core chips can be had for $20 more (which okay, is a 40% markup), but AMD actually has a wide range of CPUs for the same amount of money. You can get yourself a dual core Athlon for the same price as the Celeron 430 on NewEgg (Even if you overclock the Celeron, two cores are better than one for $50).
Okay, I admit I bashed AMD after I got the Celeron chip, but remember I overclocked the chip 33%. I didn't do a followup post, but the cheap motherboard wasn't fully able to handle the overclocked processor after several hours of operation. That's why I ended up having to set the Celeron 430 back to 1.8ghz, in which it had its ass handed to it several times by the Athlon X2. If you are going to use a cheap motherboard with the Celeron chip (which you most likely are, if you are only buying a Celeron), then chances are you too will run into crashes.
Today, AMD has a slew of processors under the Celeron 430's price. As I mentioned before, it's even possible to get a dual core Athlon for the same price. AMD also has a variety of new LE (I'm guessing it stands for Low Energy or something similar) processors including $30 Semprons and $45 Athlons that come with fans / heatsinks. The freaking LE-1160 (which is $45 at the time of this writing from NewEgg) runs at 45w, 2.4ghz and has a megabyte of L2 cache.
We'll see how my next experiment goes (with the LE-1160, naturlich!)...
