The Celeron-D has the dubious honour of being the only shipping CPU series that Intel produces using the NetBurst architecture (Pentium Ds are no longer produced, although they're still available. In contrast, the Core 2 Duo, Quad and Extreme CPUs are all based on the Core architecture.
The long-pipeline NetBurst architecture of the Celeron-D means that these chips have to be clocked at high frequencies in order to perform well. As a result, the two current models, the 352 and 356, are clocked at 3.2GHz and 3.33GHz respectively, which is much higher than AMD's budget Sempron series CPUs, which are clocked at between 1.6GHz and 2.2GHz. The Celeron-Ds also have more Level 2 cache than any Sempron (512KB), and they also support EM64T and Execute Disable. Like the Sempron series, the Celeron-Ds are single-core CPUs.
Both of the Celeron-Ds we tested performed better than the similarly priced Semprons in our Media Benchmarks, and were also slightly faster in SuperPi and Cinebench. However, Celeron-Ds suffer from the same problem as all NetBurst-based CPUs, namely poor performance in games. For example, not even the Celeron-D 356 was able to achieve a smooth frame rate in Quake 4, let alone Medieval II: Total War, in which the frame rate was frankly shambolic. Interestingly, like the Semprons, Celeron-Ds performed worse in Vista than in XP, possibly due to their tiny Level 2 cache.
There's almost no performance difference between the similarly priced Celeron-D 356 and Sempron 3400+, but we'd probably buy the former, since (providing you have a decent motherboard) this would allow you to upgrade to a much faster Core 2 Duo at a later date.
Click here for full details of the Intel Celeron-D family.
Author: James Gorbold
Intel Celeron-D