On 7 Oct 99, at 15:24, Phat Nguyen wrote:

> I have trouble here, I don't know which is better at graphics
> between Celeron and K6-II. Please help me.

  Well, these are CPUs -- neither one does graphics *directly*.  They
do, however, have architectural differences which may affect the
performance of some kinds of graphics software.
  So I'd like to rephrase the question as:  "I need to buy (or build -
- this *is* PCBUILD, after all) a PC to do some graphics stuff;
should I be looking at Celeron or K6-2 systems?"
  This isn't specific enough about your graphics needs to declare a
clear winner, but it lets us compare relevant feature differences
which might influence your choice.

  Unless you're thinking of an add-on 3D acclerator such as those
from 2Dfx or Nvidia, you likely want good AGP video performance.
Basically, all motherboards that support Celeron also have AGP; the
K6-2 can be used (probably not to its full potential) in a variety of
older boards without AGP, and some of the newer Socket7 boards have
"issues" with AGP.  Let's give this one to the Celeron, marginally.

  Another factor, though, is memory access speeds -- typically driven
off the FSB (Front-Side Bus) speed.  This can be 100 MHz for the K6-
2, but is only supposed to be 66 MHz for Celeron.  To be sure, some
Celeron models can run successfully at 100 MHz, but this
("overclocking") voids the warranty.  Gotta give this one to the K6-2.
  Memory access speeds can be less important if many data items can
be held in cache memory for fast access.  The Celerons have 128K of
cache; SS& boards offer a minimum of 256K, with 512K and 1MB common
and 2MB occasionally spotted.  This goes to the K6-2 as well.
  On the other hand, Slot 1 is supposed to feature some kind of dual
memory bus.  This seems like it should speed things up, but I've
never seen a measurement confirming that it did -- and maybe only PII
and PIII are equipped to use it.

  MMX wa the first group of instructions added to the x86 family
since the Pentium was introduced, and both Celeron and K6-2 include
it.
  Rendering performance on some 3D applications (especially games)
can be improved by pipelining of the FPU, an area where AMD is still
catching up to Intel's lead.
  On the other hand, the K6-2 introduces some new instructions,
similar in concept to MMX but applicable to floating-point arithmetic
rather than integers; Intel has countered with their "Katmai"
instructions, but these are only in the PIII and not in the Celeron.
On yet *another* hand, these can only do any good if you run software
that uses them, so it's hard to know which will be best for you.

  Finally, there's the cost issue.  Odds are good that you can
buy/build a K6-2 based system for a bit less than you can a Celeron
system; on the other hand, the latter may be upgradable to PIII if
your needs and/or budget grow, and there's limited future potential
in K6-2 box.
  I'd say that if you already have a case and power supply, you may
be able to save money by going K6-2, but if you must buy everything
new then Celeron is probably a better investment.

David G

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