Well it's time again to look at another VIA C3. This time VIA have provided a C3 running at
866MHZ. I've decided to go a bit more in depth as people seem to want that. So I'm shooting it
out against a Celeron 733.
Now getting things clear, the Celeron 733 will perform alot better in benchmarks based on
performance than the C3. VIA openly admit this as they are not marketing it for the performance
side of things. The C3's merit lies in its silent operation and low power consumption.
The C3 Box
A close up of a C3
For the tests I'll be running the C3 on the same board with the exact same setup as the Celeron.
That setup is:
- Soltek 65KV2-T
- 512meg Cas2 pc133
- ATI Xpert 2000 Pro
- Onboard AC97 codec
- Generic Realtek 8139 chipset Network card
- 40gig DiamondMax60+ ATA133 7200RPM enclosed in a silentdrive
- 300watt Antec 'silent' PSU
Now that is the basis of a great server. As you can see it has all the current silent pc products in
it. This machine acts as my home server and I want it on 24/7 so as quiet as possible. The
silentdrive does a good job of keeping everything quiet and the Antec PSU is near silent. When I
had the system running the Celeron I was cooling it by an Antec silent CPU cooler. So the only
noise was the CPU fan so I changed it to a C3 after I did the first review. Now the machine runs
silent and I can sleep in the same room. The only noise factor is the hard drive as the Maxtor is a
bit loud, I really should have bought a Seagate Barracuda IV as they are silent. Down to
business.
First up it's Sisoft Sandra on both CPUs
CPU Benchmark
CPU MultiMedia Benchmark
As you can see the C3 performs very badly here. But that's not a major problem. VIA stress the
point that it isn't a games CPU. So these results are surprising really, but it's still a good CPU for
standard tasks like watching a DVD.
Now the temperature test
Temperatures
As expected the C3 walks away with this benchmark. These temperatures for the C3 are without
a fan too so it's quite amazing how cool the C3 runs. The Intel heats up a fair bit when put under
load.
Last but not least, power consumption
Power consumption
This is often overlooked however it is important when you think about it. If you're planning on
using the C3 in a quiet machine you want less power consumption. The less power used means
more power for other things like more hard drives. However this doesn't matter too much in this
case as only 1 hard drive is being used, but it's nice to know you have the power if needed.
Conclusion
Both CPUs have their merits as budget chips. The Celeron performs better than the C3 but the
VIA uses less power and requires little cooling. It's what you use the system for really. The C3 is
a great chip for DVD machines or home servers but definitely not games. Both are budget CPUs
and come in around the same price. The C3 is staying in my server and the Celeron is now sold.
For the record, the C3 is available from dabs.com as I had so many requests from people trying to track one
down !!
Want to discuss this in our forum? CLICK HERE!
|
