Are Celerons Just Crappy

[TPFanatic]

having gone to business school i understand warranty and quality control, and being a geek i understand the center of the wafer becomes the fastest Pentiums while whatever leftover silicon becomes Celerons, and we're so far past the warranty period that quality control comes down to the end-user LOL.

so i make this thread seeking confirmation bias that I'm not out of my mind when I notice that, of my more recent old butt ThinkPad acquisitions, being an R500 with a Celeron and an R51e with a Celeron, both of which simply do not function properly outside of BIOS, that I want to blame the Celerons.

with the R500 I had ordered a P8600 to replace the Celery with, but life got in the way and i have no idea where the P8600 eloped off to, so i've resorted to simply cannibalizing the R500.

with the R51e I've ordered a $6 PM750 to just slap in there and see if things work better.

R500 could boot memtest, but R51e can't even do that.

will report back.

side-note: For the very, very basic Internet usage I demand from these old ThinkPads, they're surprisingly far from useless LOL, even capable of browsing Reddit and playing lichess. and with infinitely large page files on Solid State storage the RAM limits just don't matter LOL.

[RealBlackStuff]

Celerons are indeed the lowest of the low, just like a certain Drumpf.
Extremely difficult to get any worse than that.
Hardly any brain and the poorest performance that is technically possible.
Need I say more?

[dr_st]

Celerons are crappy, but should not be to the point that they cannot even boot. They are just super-slow.
Will be interesting to read your follow-up after trying the Pentium M.

[axur-delmeria]

Celerons from the Pentium M up to the Core 2 Duo generations don't even have Speedstep-- which means they run at full speed even when idle and eat through the battery. Years ago, a friend upgraded his HP Compaq laptop from a Celeron M 900 to a Core 2 Duo and was surprised it ran longer on battery afterward.

[TPFanatic]

i shouldn't be surprised then if my celeries have toasted themselves

[ZaZ]

It probably looks pretty good compared to a Pentium II.

[rsomethin]

Got a pc once for school with no knowledge what a celeron was. Its was a nightmare and now it will barely boot.

[dr_st]

No kidding. The Thinkpad X11e equipped with a Celeron N2940 was the slowest most sluggish laptop I've ever experienced. I actually think something is broken. Maybe the curse of the Celeron is contagious to other hardware.

[ZaZ]

I want to say like 10 or 12 years ago someone gave me a doorbuster laptop they had gotten that offered an AMD CPU with performance equivalent performance to a Celeron. I popped in a SSD and did clean install, which made it very usuble. That may not hold water in 2025.

[axur-delmeria]

No kidding. The Thinkpad X11e equipped with a Celeron N2940 was the slowest most sluggish laptop I've ever experienced. I actually think something is broken. Maybe the curse of the Celeron is contagious to other hardware.

At home, there's a laptop with a Celeron N3160 (one generation newer, but is more like a die-shrink of the N2940 with little improvements), and even with after an SSD upgrade it was sluggish. OTOH it was a WD Green 120GB SSD, so it's not particularly fast.

Later models like the J4125 have a newer CPU architecture that has higher IPC (instructions per clock), and the N5105 improves on that even more. After that, Intel retired the Celeron branding, but further improved the CPU design, becoming the E-cores (efficiency cores) of Alder Lake (Intel 12th gen).

Intel also released E-core only budget CPUs like the N100 (roughly comparable to a Core i3-6100 in performance) and the Core i3-N305 (8-core variant).

[TPFanatic]

here to update that at least in the case of the R51e, replacing the Celeron with a $6 Pentium did not fix the laptop.

i notice that it simply does not recognize more than 1GB of RAM ever, even with 2GB installed, even with both slots occupied. therefore i deduce there is a fault elsewhere in the chipset. interestingly it is an ATI chipset.

now i wish i had gone for a regular R52 instead. no matter. it was fun to play with. perhaps now i understand why previous owner punched a hole in the LCD.

[axur-delmeria]

Intel processors didn't have integrated memory controllers until Nehalem/Core i7.

The R51e's chipset is quite finicky. One of my clients had a laptop with the same chipset (ATI RC410M) and I only managed to upgrade it from 1GB to 1.5GB because none of the 1GB sticks I had on hand worked, and only the 512MB one did. The 1GB sticks worked fine when tested on my X61 so I knew they were good.

[TPFanatic]

from: https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/ati-rc410.g757

Codename: Farquaad

so it's named after the Shrek villain who is named after a college dormitory. Got myself a meme laptop here.

in any case I've elected to upgrade one of the Celery R500's to a $6 P8700. with the 30-pin LCD cables for R-series being unobtanium and there being not really any good way to fit a T-series LCD cable in an R-series case, i'll just have to make do with the good ol 1280x800 i suppose. but for T500s blowing out their left hinges I'd want to say T500 is better in every way. but now im kinda just upset at the engineering behind T500 and R500 both. no wonder we weep and despair so much.

[axur-delmeria]

in any case I've elected to upgrade one of the Celery R500's to a $6 P8700. with the 30-pin LCD cables for R-series being unobtanium and there being not really any good way to fit a T-series LCD cable in an R-series case, i'll just have to make do with the good ol 1280x800 i suppose.

IIRC you can transplant an entire T500 lid to an R500?

[TPFanatic]

between t500 and r500 no….

between t400 and r400 yes.

between t61 14” wide and r61 14” wide yes.

but between t/r400 and t/r61 14” wide i think no

between r61 15.4” and r500 yes

between t500 and t61 15.4” no

worse issue is t500, t400, and r400 get new LCD cabling to move the microphone to the lid.

weirdest of all is z61m with a dedicated webcam module and that adds extra microphones in the lid in addition to the microphone in the base like wtf

[ogopogo]

even capable of browsing Reddit and playing lichess.

On what browser? Just curious, I have a crappy laptop with AMD E450 with Slackware installed and like to play some chess.