The budget PC market is one of those places where no one wants to admit going, but everyone does. Most of us have built a PC for our mom or sister or friend that needs nothing but the bare essentials and, oh, did they mention they want it dirt cheap? Such is the life of a modern day PC enthusiast. That isn"t a completely fair assumption of course as I have a system in my office that was considered a "budget" system when I built it to serve as a file server for benchmark purposes. These $500 and under machines have all kinds of uses and can facilitate bringing the digital world to just about everyone. Today we are going to be looking at two options for that budget system; one based on the Intel Celeron D processor and the other on AMD"s newly announced Sempron family of processors.
AMD Sempron 2800+
The Sempron family is AMD"s newly announced family of processors to cater to the budget PC crowd that includes emerging markets and all the examples we used above. Where once the name of Duron stood below the Athlon, now doth Sempron. There was a gap in between the two of course where AMD"s budget processors were in fact Athlon processors, just the older, slower models. You will find that in reality, that is still the case.
Intel Celeron 335
With the release of the Prescott core Pentium 4 chips, Intel has been fairly quiet about its release of the new Celeron D processor, based on the same 90nm core technology. The Celeron used to be easily knocked to the side by the lower priced Athlon XP cores but the new D revision adds to the L2 cache for a total of 256 KB.