Price Guides November 2004: CPU and Motherboards

Intel Processors - Celeron

While AMD continues to push Sempron out to the world, Intel has rather quietly upgraded their Celeron lineup with a new core (Prescott) to help boost its viability in budget desktop systems. Ever since this core change, the Celeron has had new life breathed into it in such a way that makes it a chip worth choosing, if high-end performance is not of paramount importance. It also helps that these chips still operate on socket 478 and would not invoke the high costs of 775.

The Intel Celeron D (478) 330, which is a 2.66GHz processor, is more than sufficient for basic desktop use and competes well with AMD's Sempron lineup of processors. Likewise, this processor is priced at a level that should be affordable to even the most budget-conscience users out there.