As an adjunct to Drew's comments, we have a good FAQ on PentiumIII
on The NOSPIN Group web site:
    http://nospin.com/pc/PentiumIII_faq.html
Our list of FAQs is growing all the time:
       http://nospin.com/pc/faqs.html

   Bob Wright


At 01:19 PM 8/14/99 , Drew Dunn wrote:
>There's nothing "bad" about a Celeron chip.  Intel has positioned that chip
>as an entry-level processor, but its performance is still extremely good.
>I'm tempted to say that the production costs are higher for a PII than for a
>Celeron, but I'm not actually sure that is the case.  The most significant
>difference between a PII and a Celeron is that the level 2 cache on a PII is
>four times larger than that of a Celeron, so at a given clock speed a PII
>will outperform a Celeron on CPU intensive operations.  Also, the Celeron
>uses a 66MHz bus and the PII may use a 100MHz bus...although I'm not sure
>about the PII 333.
>
>Here's an example: I work in R&D at a networking company.  We just produced
>an "all in one" Internet server that does all the usual stuff: email, web
>serving, file serving, proxy, firewall, etc...and it runs on a Celeron 333.
>Even with 50 users, the system uses only a fraction of the processor's
>bandwidth.
>
>Depending upon the use that you intend for your notebook, you may find that
>the Celeron is a good choice.  In fact, unless your are performing torturous
>graphical or numerical operations, you probably won't be able to tell the
>difference in performance between a Celeron 400 and a PII 333.
>
>So, my opinion on the Celeron vs. PII pricing structure is that it's just a
>matter of marketing.
>
>If your system was one of the first PII's to be produced it's unlikely that
>a P3 will be a plug-in replacement.  But since Dell uses industry-standard
>ATX motherboards, you're probably in luck...you can simply replace the
>motherboard with an aftermarket board.  And since a good quality motherboard
>is around US$100-125 (mailorder), it's a pretty economical upgrade.

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