Guide to Intel Celeron D Processors - Great value for the price, Budget CPUs for your PC.

Intel has been making CPUs for many years and has perfected their marketing to provide solutions for budget PCs, mainstream PCs, extreme gamer systems, professional workstations, and finally enterprise servers. The D in Celeron D indicates the current generation of LGA 775 Celerons to help keep them separate from the old Socket 478 generations of the product line. The Celeron D brand is specifically the lower end budget range CPUs where the bottom line price for the PC has to be low however the chips will work with the current higher end motherboards. Do not let the price fool you, some of these Celeron D's actually outperform some Pentium 4s.

Celeron D's all support EM64T technology for use with 64-bit operating systems, however they do not support the Intel Hyperthreading feature which allows the CPU to register 1 physical core as 2 CPUs in the operating system. Another design that sets this CPU from the pack and places it in the value or budget range, is that the front side bus is 533MHz while the latest CPUs have as fast as 1333MHz bus speeds  Finally the most important feature of the Celeron D is they usually have 50% of the L2 cache size as the Pentium D cores of their generation.

Here are a sampling of 5 different Celeron D's that I found in just a few quick minutes of searching to give us some examples to reference:

Celeron D 336 2.8GHz (Prescott core @ 90nm) LGA 775, EM64T, 533MHz fsb, 256kb L2 cache
- These are around $45 shipped and use the older generation of single core 90nm Prescott architecture. - This is an exception since it is a Celeron D variation of the Prescott, which in turn is the LGA 775 version of the 512kb L2 cache Socket 478 Pentium Northwood line. I hope I didn't lose you there, just wanted you to know why this particular Celeron D only has 256kb L2 cache while most Prescott core Pentium 4 CPUs have 1mb of L2 cache. It's also the cheapest Celeron D I could find.

Celeron D 347 3.06GHz (Cedar Mill core @ 65nm) LGA 775, EM64T, 533MHz fsb, 512kb L2 cache
- These are around $49 shipped and use the single core that is the same as the Pentium D dual core line, just with a single core instead of packaged with a 2nd core.
- The Pentium D Smithfield dual core CPU was Intel's first generation dual core CPU. They came with 1mb of L2 cache. So while technically a Smithfield had a total of 2mb of L2 cache on the chip (2x1mb from each core), the Cedar Mill has half of one of those L2 caches and has 512kb L2 cache.

Celeron D 352 3.2GHz (Cedar Mill core @ 65nm) LGA 775, EM64T, 533MHz fsb, 512kb L2 cache
- These are around $52 shipped and are the same as the Celeron D 347, just the next speed stepping up.

Celeron D 356 3.33GHz (Cedar Mill core @ 65nm) LGA 775, EM64T, 522MHz fsb, 512kb L2 cache
- These are around $56 shipped and are the same as the Celeron D 352, just the next speed stepping up.

Celeron D 360 3.4GHz (Cedar Mill core @ 65nm) LGA 775, EM64T, 522MHz fsb, 512kb L2 cache
- These are around $65 shipped and are the same as the Celeron D 356, just the next speed stepping up.

In reference with the above Celeron D examples, I would say the best value is dependent on the a couple factors:

What will the system be used for? /What are the performance needs?

What is the budget for the PC? Can we fit everything in and get the right CPU?

I'll start with the first question as arguably the need and use of a PC will decide what the overall budget available is to build it. What the systems intended use will be determines the CPU size needed. I'll stop you right here if you want to build a PC for gaming, graphic design, any kind of CPU intensive operations like heavy encoding or lots of compressing or decompressing of files and music. Celerons are designed for budget use and even basic office operations. The low cache and front side bus limits these CPUs from performing anywhere near the Pentium D series of CPUs or even coming close to the Core 2 Duo, or Core 2 Quad series. We're talking a different league and you shouldn't even consider a Celeron D if you need the PC to do any of those above mentioned tasks.

These Celerons are perfect for the office, for home casual web surfing, for doing homework, or even in some of the media center PCs where you just need something small and quiet to sit in the corner and watch movies on. Even some older games (pre 5 years ago) will run fine on the faster Celeron D's, but with the newer games, the Celeron D probably wouldn't even be able to decompress installer CD. Some of the Pentium D and Core 2 Duo dual core CPUs in the low $100 price range are really ideal for a strong media PC solution, however the Celeron D can hold its own for these basic tasks. The trick with using a system with a Celeron D is not to try to do too much at once. The dual core CPUs are for heavy multi tasking, but these Celeron Ds are designed for a minimal work load to perform. Do one thing at a time and you won't run into trouble. Ripping a CD, while trying to zip a 500mb folder will be bad news.

Now if you've decided on which one to get, my advice would be to get the fastest one possible that matches the cooling solution you have available. If you are using a micro PC or system similar to a Shuttle Brand unit, then I'd go with something that you feel can keep cool. Otherwise get the fastest one you can get and stay within your budget.

I built my wife a Shuttle PC with a Celeron D 336 2.8Ghz. It has 1gb of DDR-400, 80gb hard drive, DVDRW drive, and a Sapphire X300 512mb Hyper memory video card. She has it connected to her LCD TV and surfs the web, listens to music, programs her iPod, while watching TV in the Picture-in-Picture window. She has zero problems but says sometimes when updating her iPod it takes a couple seconds for iTunes to send the music but otherwise she loves it. The system is quiet as a mouse and about the size of a shoe box. I have not had to mess with it beyond the once a month reboot and dusting maintenance.