Lab Update: Celeron E1500 in Bench, Twitter & AT Redesign
by Anand Lal Shimpi on July 16, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Anand
The Update
I’ve spent the past few weeks catching up on some smartphone and Apple stuff and I’m happy to say that I’m almost done. I still have EVGA’s GeForce GTX 285 Mac Edition to finish up and I’m currently chasing down a strange OS X vs. Windows 7 performance issue that I noticed in my most recent article. In short, it appears that highly threaded performance under OS X 10.5.7 isn’t as good as it is under Windows. There aren’t that many good cross-platform benchmarks, so the testing is far from conclusive and I’m honestly still doing some digging but I am making progress.
I just finished testing the GeForce GTX 285 Mac Edition from EVGA and it, well, performed like you would expect a GTX 285 to. There are some quirks and interestingly enough, under OS X, I can’t get it to be appreciably faster than the Radeon HD 4870 Mac Edition. Under Windows, the 285 is obviously faster than the Radeon HD 4870.
I’ve also found that it’s unbelievably easy to turn a Radeon HD 4870 into a Mac Edition card. Google (or Bing) is your friend.
I’m on Twitter
I’ve been on Twitter for a while but I think I’m finally (admittedly far too late) at the point where I get the vast majority of my information from it. I tend to give out little tidbits of what I’m working on via my Twitter account, so if you’re curious about what I’m doing or how my testing is going follow @anandshimpi.
AnandTech Redesign - It’s Coming
I’ve also been working on a long, long (long) overdue redesign for AnandTech. Yep, this site is going to look modern again. I’m talking full overhaul here; the plan is to modernize and structure everything, revamp the comments, make it easier to find what you’re looking for and generally make everything better. The new site won’t launch for a few months but I’ll keep you all posted here on progress. If you have any specific requests, I’d love to hear them.
Intel’s Celeron E1500 in Bench
I’ve been too tied up with smartphones and covering Apple to touch my CPU testbeds in a while, but today I managed to finish testing Intel’s Celeron E1500. The processor joins a bunch of others in AnandTech Bench.
The Celeron E1500 is a Conroe based (65nm) dual-core processor with a meager 512KB L2 cache to share between its cores. The two cores run at 2.2GHz and the chip has EIST and EMT64, although there’s no hardware virtualization support.
Intel charges $53 for the E1500. The equivalently priced AMD CPU, the Athlon X2 5200 ($57) is faster in the vast majority of cases.
Since it’s based on Conroe, the E1500 manages to be faster than most Pentium 4s. Even the 3.46GHz Pentium EE 955 is slower in some cases (or just as fast in others).
I still need to run VIA’s Nano through Bench, but I’ll save that for another time.
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ultimatebob - Sunday, July 19, 2009 - link
As part of this site upgrade, are the forums finally going to be upgraded as well? We've been hearing rumors of upgrading from FuseTalk to vBulletin for almost a year now...William Gaatjes - Sunday, July 19, 2009 - link
Your site is fantastic as it is: Simple , intuitive in navigation and inviting.Since Tom's hardware Modernised their site it went down the drain.
Since Arstechnica modernised their site it went down the drain.
Please, do not make it a flash heaven. Or a website that is less instructive.
MHz Tweaker - Friday, July 17, 2009 - link
I had the E1200 in March of 2008 on my X48 board for a month or two while I waited for the Q9450's to come out. The e1200 (1.6GHz) chip overclocked like mad to 3200MHz without complaint the entire time I owned it. I think I paid like $39 for my chip and even with the low 512 cache, this is one speedy chip, especially overclocked.I prefer the reliability of an Intel chipset today. My previous CPU was an Atlon64 3200 before the Core 2 chips. Today it's a 4GHz 920 i7 on eVGA Classified. Still, these little dual core Celeron's go a long way toward clearing the Celeron family name. Yes there are better chips but the point being these CPU's are not to be feared like some of the Celerons of the past.
jap0nes - Thursday, July 16, 2009 - link
Is it strange that Windows performs better than Mac OS? Why?You're looking for benchmarks that show better performance on mac os then?
larson0699 - Thursday, July 16, 2009 - link
It isn't strange; it's development. OSX is aging--still robust nonetheless--but not written to the same priorities as Windows. Just look at how long it took MS to put together something with speed, stability, AND security (and a gi-normous driver cache that'll put old hard drives to shame). Apple is Apple; you take their narrow path or you don't.And I'd be careful how I say that on performance; Windows could run circles around Mac OS in completing tasks, but don't count on those idle cycles to save your battery the same as Mac would. For the record, I'm a PC fan.
vailr - Thursday, July 16, 2009 - link
The (2.5 GHz, 45nm, 2 Mb cache) E5200 CPU looks to be a much better processor choice for only $10 more:http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...">http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...
Both are rated at 65W.
ilkhan - Thursday, July 16, 2009 - link
I actually really like the site layout as it is right now. But for the love of all that is site design do NOT follow X-bit labs in their horrible choice to pull the featured article *out* of the latest article list making that list jump around at random.dastruch - Thursday, July 16, 2009 - link
Give us a review of the 2nd gen Intel "Postville" SSDs, Anand. These drives are already listed in several sites in Europe:http://geizhals.at/eu/?fs=postville">http://geizhals.at/eu/?fs=postville
fmaste - Thursday, July 16, 2009 - link
As a cross-platform benchmarks you can try encoding with Handbrake, is multiplatform and you can set the number of threads.And for the GPU there are some games that are available for Mac and Windows to compare.
Some questions abount the Mac Pro:
It has no fans? is it silent? temperature?
SLI or CrossFire works as it should with OSX or is just for adding more monitors?
virvan - Thursday, July 16, 2009 - link
hey, where are the promised Athlon XP's in the Bench? :)