Question about Pentium vs. Celeron?

[Greg12]

R celeron processors bad for video capture and encoding.

I'm found a 400 dollar desktop w/ 120 gig hard drive and Celeron 2.0 ghz.

[mrtristan]

I think the only difference is that the Celerons have less on board cache. I don't know how that would affect video capturing. It probably wouldn't matter at that speed, though. A lot of the people here capture with 400-500Mhz Celerons.

[sterno]

They have a small cache, but in all fairness Intel has given all of their recent processors a pretty small on-chip cache. I think the Celerons also have a thoroughly crippled math unit. But I haven't kept up with the last few revisions of the Celeron, so they might have changed that - check some site like Tom's Hardware, I think they had a review of the current set of Celerons not long ago.

Those things will make encoding and filtering take longer, but even the Celerons are now fast enough that it shouldn't be too bad. For capture your CPU isn't usually a big factor unless you're doing real-time software compression or some such.

I'd be more concerned about the other components in a $400 system. Some of the cheap machines use slow memory and/or crappy on-board shared-memory video controllers. Make sure it uses DDR-SDRAM or RDRAM, and make sure it either doesn't have on-board video or allows you to disable it with an AGP card. There are some really good deals out there, but there are also some cheap machines that are actually rip-offs. If you do a little research you should be fine, though.

[Greg12]

W/ a 2ghz processor, I should be able to capture MPEG 1 in real time good quality right?

[Kennyshin]

I think Northwood-based Celeron 2.0GHz processor is fast enough for capturing and encoding. Only 128KB L2 cache instead of 512KB in P4 Northwood but it does not affect much on such tasks. Considering the price difference I mean. 2.0GHz Celeron can be easily overclocked to 2.66GHz as well.

[MOVIEGEEK]

All Celerons 1.0 to 1.2ghz have a 256kb L2 cache and run a 100mhz FSB,1.3-1.7ghz have 128kb and run a 200mhz FSB(PC1600),1.8-2.0ghz run at 400mhz(PC2100)and have a 512kb cache.All 1.0-2.0ghz have a .13micron chip,same as PIII Tualitin and P4.

[ChrisX]

I can compare with two computers I own, one is a Pentium 4, 2.0 Ghz and the other is a Celeron, 1.1 Ghz. There isn't much difference in capturing performance.

The onus is the type of capturing device is being used and the cpu speed.

The Pentium and the Celeron are from Intel anyway. I don't have a problem with my Compaq computer which is a Celeron using a WinTV card. The other computer has a much better capture video card, a WinFast VIVO.

Generally, overall the Pentium is a much better performer in just about everything you do on the computer.