Duron vs. Celeron

Company: Overclockerz Store
Product: AMD Duron 600 @ 1Ghz
OCZ Price: $69.99
Date Reviewed: December 28, 2000
Reviewed By: Sykotic

The newcomer to the block:

Background Info:

Back in the dark ages, Celerons and K6-2s were considered the value line of processors. Today things have changed a bit, Intel has taken their new coppermine P3 chip, disabled half the L2 cache, and conveniently called it their new line of Celerons. AMD also decided to use less L2 cache when creating the Durons (when compared to the Athlons), however AMD chips have a lot more L1 cache then the Intel counterparts. Also, from the transistor count below, you can clearly see that the Duron actually took a little engineering effort in designing a new chip.

Check out the table below for a quick comparison, I am only going to include the latest CPU info, and not the older cores since that information is not relevant.

These days early adopters of Celerons are getting blown away in games and even desktop applications by these new high-end processors like the Pentium IIIs and Athlons. Well now that AMD has introduced its new "Value Line" processor, the Duron, it is possible for users on a budget to have excellent systems and stand up to the big shots. With the Durons selling at a cheaper price than the Celerons it's nice to say that the Durons are worth a lot more then you pay for them. I got my Duron 600, generously donated by the OverclockerZ Store, last weekend, unlocked and pre-tested at 1GHz. This baby packs one hell of a punch, it performs just as good as the Athlon 1GHz, but at a fraction of the cost.

System Setups:

To compare the two processors, the two setups were kept as similar as possible. The same components were used in each system except for the processors and the motherboards, the two different motherboards used in the tests were the KT7-RAID by ABIT, and the SE6 by ABIT.

Go To Page 2 For The Benchmarks & Conclusion...