Celeron vs. Pent IV vs. AMD???

[pisces7378]

Hey ya'll,

I have a friend that is trying to get into home recording on a 'limited' budget. His needs are not very high as far as I/O and track count are. Basically he needs to be able to record a maximum of 2 simulatious tracks at once and play back maybe 4-8 tracks.

Now we are starting from ground zero i.e. we need a new PC.

He is looking into an eMachine because they are great quality for the money. The only problem is that they are all equiped with Celeron CPU's up until their more high end machines which switch to AMD's and cost an ass load.

I have always heard that Celeron's are crap for recording. Someone (who knows what the fuck they are talking about) please level with me and tell me if it is like IMPOSSIBLE to record with a 2.0 g.hz celeron or is it just some sort of pissing contest where people don't like celeron's because they cost less?

I have never had a celeron CPU so I am of no help.

Will it work???

We only need...
2 simultanious recording tracks
4-8 playback tracks
and the ocassional plug-in effect. Nothing spectacular just a reverb or two and maybe some EQ and tape delay.

Any help or tipps would be considered gold!!!

Cheers!

 

[fenix]

i have a 2.0 celeron and also a computer with a 2.4 pentium 4 and I would never consider recording with the celeron. it's too damn slow for dreamweaver/fireworks/flash so i know it would be too damn slow for audio.

 

[DAFFYDRUNK]

It will probably work for what you say but it won't be long before you wanna do more elaborite stuff. The Celeron will fall on its face. Basically the purpose ot the P4 Celeron is to sell cheap computers with a clock speed that sounds fast. The reality is even earlier Athlon XPs will still smoke a newer Celeron. Basically the Celeron has a 20 stage pipline like a P4, only it only has a teeny tiny 128k cache. Since more pipeline stages in the cpu require more L2 cache, the Celeron is quite castrated compared to it's P4 sibling. Can't imagine an Athlon XP based machine can cost that much more. Athlon XP machines with anyhting 2500+ or less are cheaper to build that Intel Celeron machines...

 

[Sangram]

The 2.0 Celeron is pretty much crap for anything except an office.

It is base off the old P4 core (willamette, not the northwoods that came out the middle of last year) and has half the cache. Dog slow.

Will it work? Yes it will. It is almost as good as a P3 running half the speed, so it makes up for its crippled cache by the virtue of its clockspeed. Be prepared to go very light on plugins, and use tricks from the old P2 days like submixing and so on to ensure the system works at acceptable latencies.

Pick parts off Newegg and build it yourself. You can get a rocking 2500+ Barton system for pretty much peanuts.

 

[noisedude]

Yeah, that'd be my route. Get a mainboard with as much integrated stuff as possible (plenty of USB, LAN, extra IDE controller if you need) and bob in your CPU and RAM and you're away! All you need to add then is your soundcard (which for the money must be an M-Audio Audiophile) and your hard disks / optical drives. If everything goes according to plan it only takes a couple of hours!