Intel Celeron D 346 review

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Verdict:

Intel's Celeron D range is a vast improvement over Celeron processors. Both the 330 and 346 outperformed AMD's Sempron chips, and the Celeron D 346 is a worthy rival for the cheaper Athlon 64 processors. The Celeron D 346 is a powerful budget processor that punches well above its £77 price.

Review Date: 21 Nov 2005

Price when reviewed: inc VAT

Our Rating 5 stars out of 5

ExpertReviews Award

Review
Specs

Core: Prescott

Frequency: 3.06GHz

Socket: LGA775

Process: 90nm

Cores: One

Instructions: MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, EM64T

Multiplier: 23x

External bus: 133MHz

Effective FSB speed: 533MHz

Level 1 cache: 16KB

Level 2 cache: 256KB

The Celeron D processor is significantly different from the Celeron range it replaces. Intel's budget processors are based on the same Prescott core as the Pentium 4 range and support the latest SSE3 extensions. Bus speeds have also been increased from 400MHz to 533MHz.

Celerons are available for both Socket 478 and LGA775 motherboards. Some LGA775 models, with product numbers ending in 1 or 6, support the EMT64T 64-bit instruction set. We tested one 32-bit Celeron running at 2.66GHz, and a faster 64-bit Celeron 346 running at 3.06GHz.

Intel processors have locked multipliers, so overclocking is not possible. However, the Celeron D processors performed well straight from the box. Even the £54 Celeron D 330 beat all the AMD Sempron processors in PCMark04. Its score of 86 in our video-encoding test was better than that of all the Semprons and even the Athlon 64 3000+, which costs almost twice as much.

The Celeron D 346's scores of 96 in the Shopper application benchmark and 3,947 in PCMark04 were better than those of the Athlon 64 3000+, which is £30 more expensive. It even played Far Cry at 39fps, so is capable of running modern games.

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