Celeron 430 vs Dual Pentium III 933MHz

[Markbo]

I currently have a Dual PIII 933MHz machine doing some real-time audio encoding and occasional software compiling. I have the opportunity to replace it with a Celeron 430 1.8GHz and just wanted to confirm that this was a smart move before doing it.

The encoding (single-threaded program) is constantly using about 80-90% of one of the PIII CPUs and the other CPU is 99% idle most of the time. The increased speed of the single core Celeron 430 should help reduce overall CPU usage and not run it near the max like now, but I'm wondering if there would be drawbacks losing SMP for compiling while encoding. Or is that PIII so ancient that the Celeron 430 should blow it out of the water in any case even being single core?

Thanks in advance.

 

[mavroxur]

umm those processors have completely separate sockets, it just won't work. (the celeron will not physically fit in that PIII socket).

If the OP is trying to just replace the chip in the system, then this is true. It's a completely different socket. If the OP is going to replace the system with a completely different system based on a Celeron 430, then yes, the Celeron 430 would be faster relatively speaking. Losing SMP wouldn't be a bad thing in this case. And unless your current encoding app is multi threaded, it's probably just using the windows built in load balancing right now anyways.

 

[MU_Engineer]

I currently have a Dual PIII 933MHz machine doing some real-time audio encoding and occasional software compiling. I have the opportunity to replace it with a Celeron 430 1.8GHz and just wanted to confirm that this was a smart move before doing it.

The encoding (single-threaded program) is constantly using about 80-90% of one of the PIII CPUs and the other CPU is 99% idle most of the time. The increased speed of the single core Celeron 430 should help reduce overall CPU usage and not run it near the max like now, but I'm wondering if there would be drawbacks losing SMP for compiling while encoding. Or is that PIII so ancient that the Celeron 430 should blow it out of the water in any case even being single core?

Thanks in advance.

A Celeron 430 is going to be a lot faster than a pair of 933 MHz PIIIs in any single-threaded task and moderately faster in multithreaded tasks. The Celeron is clocked much higher and also is quite a bit faster clock-for-clock than a Coppermine PIII. Going from a pair of CPUs to one single-core CPU will make your system somewhat less responsive while running a CPU-intensive task, but you will finish said task much faster.

Something to think about is that the Celeron 430 is a pretty old chip in itself and you cannot simply plug it into your PIII motherboard. You also cannot reuse the RAM from your PIII unit either. You would have to get a Socket 775 motherboard and appropriate RAM (likely DDR2.) Those parts are all obsolete and you can get a much more powerful currently-selling unit for the same money. Just about every chip over $50 is at least a dual-core nowdays and runs faster than the Celeron 430 core for core- most run significantly faster. I'd recommend looking at something like the Athlon II lineup since you can get a 3 GHz quad-core unit with 4 GB of modern DDR3 RAM and an AM3 motherboard for a little over $200. That will be over 50% faster than the Celeron 430 for your single-threaded tasks and probably 6-7 times as fast on multithreaded compile jobs.

 

[Markbo]

Thanks for the replies.

I should have mentioned initially that this is a complete system swap, and since it is a remote server I only have these two options available (unless I increased the budget, but I don't really need more power for this particular server).

The Celeron 430 will actually cost 30% less per month, so it sounds like a smart move both to cut costs and increase performance. I just wanted to make sure that losing SMP wouldn't cause compiling to disrupt the audio encoding application. This is running Linux by the way.

 

[MU_Engineer]

Thanks for the replies.

I should have mentioned initially that this is a complete system swap, and since it is a remote server I only have these two options available (unless I increased the budget, but I don't really need more power for this particular server).

The Celeron 430 will actually cost 30% less per month, so it sounds like a smart move both to cut costs and increase performance. I just wanted to make sure that losing SMP wouldn't cause compiling to disrupt the audio encoding application. This is running Linux by the way.

Losing SMP may cause the compiling to disrupt the audio encoding application if the audio encoding is realtime-sensitive (i.e. you are recording audio.) You could try to ameliorate that by renicing the compile job as 19 and leaving the encoding application at 0. You still might have some small hiccups on task switching though. If you are merely encoding already-recorded audio, don't worry about it, go with the Celeron setup.