Testbed and Methods

Our test session is aimed at finding out how fast the new budget Celeron D processors actually are. We tested both processor models we had at our disposal, that is 330 and 335 CPUs with 2.66GHz and 2.8GHz clock frequencies respectively. We will compared the performance of these solutions with the results shown by “old” Celeron processors on Northwood core with the 2.7GHz and 2.8GHz frequencies. Also, we included the results for the direct competitors of Intel Celeron D processors from the budget AMD CPU family, i.e. Athlon XP 2700+ and 2800+ selling at about the same price. Besides the above listed CPUs, we will also consider the results of a few Pentium 4 processors with 2.4GHz core clock rate.

Of course, we couldn’t help testing the Celeron D processor 2.66GHz overclocked to 3.8GHz, which may become an excellent overclocker’s choice if it shows adequate performance in benchmarks. And in order to be able to fairly evaluate the relative performance of this solution after overclocking, you can also see the numbers for Pentium 4 Prescott 2.8GHz and 3.2GHz as well as the numbers for Athlon XP 3200+ processors.

As a result our testbeds looked as follows:

• CPUs:
• Intel Celeron D 335 (2.8GHz, Prescott),
• Intel Celeron D 330 (2.66GHz, Prescott),
• Intel Celeron 2.8 (Northwood),
• Intel Celeron 2.7 (Northwood),
• AMD Athlon XP 2800+ (2.08GHz, 333MHz FSB, Barton),
• AMD Athlon XP 2700+ (2.17GHz, 333MHz FSB, Thoroughbred),
• Intel Pentium 4 2.4A (533MHz FSB, Prescott),
• Intel Pentium 4 2.4B (533MHz FSB, Northwood),
• Intel Pentium 4 2.4C (800MHz FSB, Northwood),
• Intel Pentium 4 2.8E (Prescott),
• Intel Pentium 4 3.2E (Prescott),
• AMD Athlon XP 3200+ (2.2GHz, 400MHz FSB, Barton)
• Mainboards:
• ASUS P4P800-E Deluxe (Socket 478, i865PE),
• ASUS A7N8X-E (Socket A, NVIDIA nForce2 Ultra 400);
• Memory: 512MB DDR400 SDRAM (2 x 256MB, 2-2-2-5);
• Graphics card: ASUS RADEON 9800XT (Catalyst 4.10);
• Storage subsystem: Western Digital WD400JB.

The tests were run in Microsoft Windows XP SP1 OS with the DirectX 9.0b installed. The BIOS Setup of the mainboards used was configured for maximum performance.

I have to point out before we start that despite the fact that we test budget CPUs today, we assembled our systems from very expensive and high-quality components. Our choice is explained by the desire to eliminate the negative influence on the testing participants’ performance of all other factors. That is why we used mainboards with dual-channel memory controller and a pretty expensive ATI RADEON 9800 XT based graphics card.

Performance

Gaming Applications

We decided to start our test session with gaming applications, as most users are interested in the performance of their systems in this type of apps first hand.