Non-professional/home tests
Archiving
Losing 25% in clock rate, dual-core Celeron E1200 nevertheless outperforms single-core Celeron 440 by nearly 8%. Strange as it may seem, larger cache doesn't provide the expected benefit, as results of Celeron E1400 vs. Pentium E2180 and Pentium E2180 vs. Core 2 Duo E4400 are not that different. Perhaps, for an archiver, even the 2 MB cache is not enough. And yet again the fastest Pentium dual-core is impressive.
Media encoding
The benefit of multi-core is obvious: Celeron E1400 outperforms Celeron 440 by 25%. But cache doesn't provide an advantage, as Celeron E1400, Pentium E2180 and Core 2 Duo E4400 are on their respective heels. Moreover, Pentium E2220 loses just 1 point to its senior brother.
Games
Well, games like both multi-core and large cache. This seems to be the only test, in which results of Pentium dual-core are clearly disappointing. Especially after a triumphant march across the previous tests.
Non-professional photo processing
Multi-core stands high, large cache stands somewhat lower.
Total non-professional/home score
It resembles the total professional score chart, just the Pentium dual-core series is a bit higher (on the 2nd place instead of the 3rd) and single-core Celeron processors definitely grouped in the bottom, losing to every dual-core model.
Conclusions
The Pentium dual-core series surprised us twice. First pleasantly, by decent performance for such a small cache; and then unpleasantly, by being unfit for games -- dream on about cheap gaming rigs.
Dual-core Celeron processors performed considerably better than single-core ones. But this series looks rather strange: 1.6 GHz Celeron E1200 is followed by 2 GHz Celeron E1400 and the performance gap in between is very wide. An intermediate 1.8 GHz Celeron E1300 would be a logical addition, and we have no idea why it hasn't been made.
On the background of dual-core Celerons, single-core models do not inspire as much optimism as before. And we'll risk assuming that their life cycle, at least in the desktop segment, is going to end soon.
But in general, the "low-end" is not as low as it might have seemed. The fastest Pentium dual-core shows average performance of 77 points. And you know that 100 points are equal to Core 2 Quad Q6600!
Memory modules provided by Corsair Russia.
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