Intel Celeron 420 - Testing continued
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POV-Ray
This program renders images and the power of the CPU influences how quickly it's done. For this test I used the biscuit image and used the 1280 x 1040 with AA setting on the picture. The time is in seconds and the lower time is better.
At the same speed the dual core beats the Celeron 420 hands down. When the Celeron is overclocked to 3.1 GHz, it pulls ahead of the E2140. The raw speed here seems to make up for the difference in the amount of cores.
WinRar
My favorite compression program has now become a benchmark. I like this program because it works with every format I use; it's also very simple to use. WinRar has a built-in benchmark tool that we will use. I have enabled multithreading, since we are running a dual core CPU. Higher speeds are best in this test.
The dual core E2140 dominates here and it looks like there isn't anything the Celeron can do to catch up. You would probably have to get the Celeron up to around 6 GHz before we would see numbers that match the dual core.
Conclusion
Today you got to see what will probably be the last review of a single core CPU at Dev Hardware. The Celeron 420 is a decent single core CPU. It beats all the other single core CPUs in the Sandra, but has a hard time keeping up with dual core CPUs. The same idea carries over to the other tests.
Now that more and more applications are becoming multithreaded, the era of single cores is coming to an end. So it all boils down to the question of whether this CPU is worth the bang for the buck. Sadly, I feel it isn't worth the consideration, even at overclocked speeds. Without another core, even at the high speeds, it can't keep up. I would recommend you either hold out for the dual core Celeron that is supposed to be on its way, or buy an E2140. I would choose the latter, as it will only be a few bucks more and you get more cache.
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