which is better? 1.6 pentium 4 or 2.4 celeron?
 

I have an old dell that came with a Pentium 4 1.6 GHz chip. I also have a Celeron 2.4 chip that i've tested out and works in this machine. My question is which is better. Should I go for for the speed or does the P4 perform better thanks to HT and such? (I'd like to make this into a Media PC, possibly MythTV)

Hmmmm.. they are pretty much the same, in my honest opinion. Besides, you won't be doing very intensive processor tasks, so it won't be at all noticeable. Since you are planning to use either as a MediaPC, you'd choose the one that requires less cooling (thus having a more silent box) and consumes less power (if you are going to have the box 24h/7d and actually care about the environment and want to have lower electricity bills that is :)).

You said you tested it....it seems you would be in a much better position to answer this. Why not run some benchmarks with each chip and see what you discover?

I think my AMD 2400XP is better---but that's not on your poll.

I would rather have more cache... and I have a general problem with celeron processors.

From a power consumption perspective those CPU's are almost identical..

Your P4 may or may not have hyper-threading depending on the model..

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...icroprocessors
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...icroprocessors

I think benchmarking them both for performance for the tasks you are going to use them for is the best way to make the determination. If they were identical speeds it would be a simple choice, What the Celeron is lacking in cache it may make up for in speed. Hyper-threading IF available on that P4 might make a difference as well. only real life testing will tell.

Personally, I've always preferred Pentiums over Celerons, but that's me. As others pointed out, I would benchmark both for your intended use and go from there. Who knows, you might be surprised.