Double Feature

Big Bargains

But maybe you don't need an expensive computer at all. With Intel's new, improved Celeron chip, bargain computers look better than they have in some time, particularly for people whose needs revolve around applications such as Word or Excel and a browser. And with prices dropping sharply, dumping your PC when it becomes outdated--as it inevitably will--won't hurt as much.

The original 266- and 300-MHz Celeron processors lacked a key feature of the Pentium II chip: a built-in secondary cache. As Dataquest analyst Nathan Brookwood puts it, Intel "saved $10 in cost of product and threw away 30 percent of the performance" when it made the original chips.

The new Celeron chips, code-named Mendocino, have a built-in 128KB secondary cache--and that's made a huge difference. In our tests, the Celeron-333 systems performed as well as PII-333 machines, despite the PII-333 chip's substantially larger 512KB cache.

How is that possible? The PII-333's cache comes in the CPU package, but it isn't part of the chip and it operates at half the processor's speed. In contrast, the Celeron's cache is built into the chip and functions at full throttle.

Intel is making Mendocino chips in 300- and 333-MHz flavors. The 300-MHz chips are labeled Celeron-300A to differentiate them from the original, cacheless Celeron-300.

In our review, we concentrated on the Celeron-333s, testing shipping versions of Compaq's $1925 Deskpro EP Model C333, Dell's $1539 Dimension V333c, and Unicent's amazing bargain, the $999 Avanta E333. All of these come with a generous 64MB of RAM.

In our PC WorldBench 98 tests, the three systems posted an average performance score of 172, identical to the average score for PII-333 machines. By way of comparison, PII-400s earned a score of 198, on average. How much speed do you really need when you're working with business applications? Well, PII-333-level velocity seems awfully fast if you're accustomed to working with a Pentium-75. But you'll also notice the difference between a PII-450 or PII-400 and a Celeron-333, especially in tasks such as spell-checking large documents or recalculating huge spreadsheets. One big reason: Like everything before the PII-350, the Celeron still chugs along on a 66-MHz system bus.

Still, the Celerons performed fairly well on our graphics tests. They do basic graphics chores like PowerPoint presentations without breaking a sweat. Of the three Celeron systems, the Dell has the most graphics horsepower; it aced our Caligari TrueSpace3 test thanks to its integrated ATI Rage Pro Turbo chip with 8MB of SDRAM. This chip handles AGP texturing, as does Unicent's ATI 3D Rage Pro, which has 4MB of SGRAM. That allows better visual quality in some apps, compared to the Matrox Millennium G100 card with 4MB of SGRAM.

Which Celeron-333 is best? The $999 Unicent (with a 15-inch monitor) is the sweetest deal. Even if you upgrade its monitor and hard drive to match the Dell's specs, this PC costs $540 less. But you can't upgrade its 4MB of SGRAM. Given its graphics advantage and 17-inch monitor, the Dell is a tempting deal from a big-league vendor. The Compaq, meanwhile, seems overpriced.