I was trying to explain to my friend how the Celery is inferior to the Pentium because of the lack of an L2 cache. Does anyone have any numbers or guesstimates to the approximate differences, as in: Would a Pentium 2.0GHz = Celeron 3.0GHz in speed? Thanks. Stephen Fox Windows 2000 5.00.2195 SP4 PENTIUM II 450MHz; 384MB RAM GATEWAY 2000 P6-450 DESKTOP 80GB

It depends. The Celeron D on the Prescott core has 256k L2 and loses to all Pentium 4's on the Northwood core and above running relatively around the same speed as the Celeron D thanks in part to its larger 512k L2 cache, but if he had a Celeron D on the Cedar Mill core with 512k L2 cache then the benchmarks become very close to a Pentium 4 on the Northwood core with 512k L2 cache. The only way a Celeron D Prescott core with 256k L2 cache has a chance to outperform a Pentium 4 Northwood core running relatively the same speed as the Pentium 4 Northwood core is if the Celeron D Prescott core with 256k L2 cache is if you overclocked 700~800mhz faster then the Pentium 4 Northwood core default speed. Now that would be considered extreme overclocking, especially with the Celeron D on the Prescott core, because those things run hot as it is with their default speed let alone an 800mhz overclock from their default speed. AMD Athlon 64 X2 4600+ OC 2.7ghz 2GB Dual Channel DDR 3200 Nvidia 7900GT SATA II 2x 300gig 7200rpm 16mb cache RAID-0 Gigabyte Nforce 4 SLI

Correction. it's suppose to be "Pentium 4's on the Northwood core and above running relatively around the same speed as the Celeron D thanks in part to its larger 256k* L2 cache" AMD Athlon 64 X2 4600+ OC 2.7ghz 2GB Dual Channel DDR 3200 Nvidia 7900GT SATA II 2x 300gig 7200rpm 16mb cache RAID-0 Gigabyte Nforce 4 SLI

but whether you see any difference depends what you are using the computer for. For many uses - like internet / office - word / XL you will not see a difference as the CPUs are using so little of their full potential