X-bit labs

Celeron E1200: Dual-Core Processor Almost for Free (page 12)

Category: CPU

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

[ 01/14/2008 | 05:11 PM ]

Conclusion

New Celeron E1200 doesn’t aim too high. It is the slowest dual-core processor in Intel’s today’s lineup. Which is actually not surprising at all, as it is the cheapest CPU at this time, too. Nevertheless, Intel made a significant step forward by introducing dual-core architecture into their budget solutions. In most cases Celeron E1200 turned out faster than the top single-core representative of this processor family, Celeron 440. Most software is already optimized for multi-threaded applications, which allows Celeron E1200 to show its real advantages in full.

However, despite all those things we have just said we can’t proclaim the new Celeron E1200 the best choice in its price segment. The thing is that dual-core AMD processors priced the same provide higher performance. Athlon 64 X2 4000+ outperformed Celeron E1200 in our tests in all tasks except those dealing with image and video processing that are not sensitive to L2 cache size.

All in all, our measurements suggest that cutting the L2 cache of the dual-core processor down to 512KB does have a serious negative effect on the performance. And overclocking will not be the remedy in this case. Although dual-core budget processors from Intel can more than double their speed as a result of successful overclocking, their gaming performance can hardly hit the level of Core 2 Duo E4600 even at 3.4GHz clock speed. That is why the new dual-core Celeron processors will hardly be of interest to gaming enthusiasts. Moreover, for only $11 more you can get Pentium E2160 that can guarantee about 25% faster gaming experience.

At the same time, the new dual-core Celeron E1200 can find its niche. For example, when overclocked these processors cope very well with video and audio encoding and pretty well with rendering. That is why dual-core Celeron processors from the E1000 series can be used in a much broader range of tasks, while their predecessors could fit only for office and simple home systems.