Computers: Pentium, Celeron or AMD? Which is best?

[Hank_Scorpio]

Quick question: which processor is better?

Obviously, Pentium's are the best and most expensive.

Are Celeron's or AMD's a good alternative? Or do you get what you pay for?

 

[Bob Crotchet]

Depends on what you want to do with it. For heavy video editing, get as many cores and as new a CPU as you can afford. For Web browsing, word proc, etc., a low- to midrange dual-core CPU will do. Intel's Core2 Duos are still out there, but the newest line is the i series (i3, i5, i7). Without checking, I'm not even sure Intel makes a dual-core Celeron any more. ... AMD is mostly low-end, although their quad-core Phenoms are nice high-end chips. I just built myself a triple-core AMD (X3 440) Windows 7 box and have been quite happy with it. ... To compare CPU power, check out the Passmark CPU charts at http://www.cpubenchmark.net/index.php and look around at http://www.tomshardware.com/us/

 

[Football_Bat]

I liked it back in the day when you had 286's, 386's and 486's. Where we at now, 2286's?

 

[amraeder]

What do you want to do with the computer?

 

[Hank_Scorpio]

Oh, I'm not even sure I'm in the market right now. Desktop works fine, but it is probably five years old. Still runs great and can play video.

Just was looking at laptops in Best Buy the other day.

If I were to get one, it would mainly be for email, web surfing, probably some freelance event coverage. Occassionally, watching video on sites like Hulu. A little bit of video gaming, but nothing online like World of Warcraft.

 

[amraeder]

That's basically what I use mine for. I have: AMD Athlon™X2 Dual-Core QL-64 (2.1GHz / 1MB). Runs like the wind for everything I do (gaming so far has been Age of Empires III and Heroes of Might and Magic V, nothing too taxing, to be sure). Based on the fact that my laptop was pretty cheap, I'd say this isn't exactly a high-end processor.

 

[crusoes]

Apple.

 

[Madhavok]

My first computer was a celeron 667 compaq that somehow got me through three years of college before purchasing my first laptop. It ran Counter-Strike and other games with ease, but I also upgraded my video card. I know the celerons are pretty much bottom of the barrel, or at least they were back in 2000.