Opinions on the Duron processor please.

Considering building a glide box with my Voodoo 5500.

Duron 1.6 is about £25 at the moment- dirt cheap.

Already have a Athlon 2600XP based system with twin Voodoo 2's and a Geforce 4600 card, so don't need this system as a main gaming rig.

Cheers

Andy

I'ma get beaten to death with a yard stick for this, but Duron cpu's suck ass.

They're like.. eek.. Celerons..
might aswell get a cheap celeron 1.4ghz (tualatin) or a celeron 2.4ghz, they cost about the same..

*lol*

The intel Celeron is known to have by far the worst IPC ever observed in any x86 CPU design to date

The AMD Duron, however, still packs its 128k of L1 Cache, plus the exclusive 64k L2 Cache, bundeled with the far superior FPU of the Athlon family.
Add SSE to it, with a fairly low specific power consumption (Celerons have almost the same TDP than Pentium4's!), and you have a really decent CPU in the very low price region.

At 1600MHz, it is measured almost persistently faster than a Celeron 2600MHz (!)

And I don't know where you guys live, but here, the Celeron 2600Mhz is at least 2x (rather 2.5-3x) the price of a Duron 1600Mhz
-----------------
All in all, that's why tech-experienced Users normally won't even touch a Celeron.

Against the AMD Duron, there is practically only one competitor :
...the AMD AthlonXP

To make a long story short :
If you buy a Celeron, you either want to spend 2-3x the money on eqal or less performance, or really have an odd reason to do so (e.g. keep an existing intel platform at all costs).

http://www.vanshardware.com/reviews/2002/01/020123_Duron_13/020123_Duron_13.htm

^the only review i could find of a 1.6ghz duron


BTW nothing beats the good ol' Tualatin P3.
Those babies can give the P4 2.4ghz a competition.

And the only difference between a P3 Tualatin and a Tualatin Celeron is the cache, p3 has 512kb, celery has 256kb.

Same core same features same speed etc', ONLY difference is the cache.

Pentium4:
remember HyperThreading, SSE3 (Prescott only) etc. technologies not used extensively yet, but the days will come...believe   should I remember you all why p4 was slower in its very beginning than a P3? the fsb (P3 133, P4 100), but i think we have overcome these days yet & with intel having licenses for AMD's 64bit technology, let's see what'll come   (at all, i'm not considering bying crappity smacking intel)

Celeron:
sucking cpu, the only good thing is the o/c capacity. i heard of one guy giving a 1,5GHz celeron 100%/3GHz only adjusting a water cooler on it.

Duron:
faster than a celeron, yeah, but no real o/c at all. at least from what i know (a 1GHz morgan wasn't able to)

AthlonXP:
might be worth the try, if you get a used & cheap one, as somebody replied already.

let's not forget: a voodoo5 needs high scaled cpus nowadays if you consider playing modern games, i.e. mesafx & 3d analyzer take a high profit of it when making the cpu doing the h t&l stuff. so you'd run better with the fastest&cheapest you can get   if you only want to give your old glide games a profitable hardware environment, you're of course satisfied with a duron (at least i was w/ a TB1GHz)

I didn't even thought of a gaming rig when talking about VIA C4. As I've said it is a good CPU for desktop, office apps, and a very low power consumption CPU for laptops. For these things it is very good. Not for games, 3D graphics and video editing.

Comment on Micha post: I agree almost totally. The only thing is that in the past and at the moment, there are cases in which an older CPU might perform slightly better than you'd expect. It's CPU arhitecture and design, rather than raw, brute Mhz muscle power that counts more sometimes. Besides that, CPU performance is sometimes not as scalable as you might expect it to be...

the modern celeron is a bastardized P4 even worse than the original Willamette P4, and now the duron is a 0.13µ part. Some people have a duron 1.4@2.2ghz with missing L2 cache enabled (!) by connecting some bridges on the cpu

Actually, the SSE, HT didn't and perhaps they would never revolutionise the world, no matter what. The only good use for them is marketing...

What would be more usefull than 5Ghz, would be a CPU  and in fact a whole PC, designed from ground-up, taking into account the future. Until now, nothing moves this way, just a bit more, a bit more, and it works (or not so).

At the moment I suppose there are black holes in the mind of CPU developers, as noone actually know 100% what is inside the CPU, because it got by far too complicated. And really, I see no efficiency when you need a 5Ghz CPU. Make some calculations on paper, and even if you take everything into account, you find out that the expected performance and times to make some operations are far from real situation. If the above is wrong, why we are talking about scalable performance? If all the CPU's would be scalable, wouldn't this word would be with no sense?