The Intel Celeron B800, a recently released low-end laptop processor, has arrived on the market.
The first notebook makers to use the dual-core 1.5GHz Celeron B800 are Acer, its subsidiary Gateway, and Toshiba, offering B800-based 15.6-inch laptops for as low as $299. That’s the price for the Acer Aspire AS5349-2481, which comes with 2GB of system memory, a 500GB hard drive, and HDMI, but you can now also buy weirdly pricier Gateway NV57H50U (2GB/250GB/HDMI) for $369, or even more expensive Toshiba Satellite C655-S5335 with 3GB RAM, a 320GB HDD, no HDMI, and included Bluetooth for $430. With no doubt, the Acer Aspire AS5349-2481 is the best bang for the buck.
These laptops run on the B800’s integrated Intel HD 3000 graphics. They have 1366×768 screens, DVD burners, web cameras, and Windows 7 Home Premium.
Regarding the CPU itself, it is based on the latest 32nm Intel “Sandy Bridge” technology, but lacks some features, such as HyperThreading and TurboBoost. It has 2MB of cache and a power consumption of 35W.
We have found benchmark results for the Celeron B800 in the PassMark database, showing that it scores 1,509 points, sligthly lower than the older dual-core Pentium P6100 (1,517) and lower than the “Sandy Bridge” Pentium B940/B950, scoring about 1,980. For comparison, AMD’s oftenly used chip in the low-end market – the E-350 – scores only 723, but it also has almost double lower power consumption of 18W.
Intel also has in its lineup the 1.6GHz Celeron B810 and 1.9GHz B840, but laptops with these chips are not available yet.
So what I want to know is are they using the socket G2 or the ball-grid-array chips? If it’s G2, and you can get the laptop apart enough to swap chips, one of the i5-24x0m CPU’s can be had on eBay for $150-$200 and would nearly triple the passmark score without affecting the 35W TDP or anything else. Crazy people could also consider swapping in a quad-core i7-2xx0QM unit (there are 2630QM’s out there for $200ish now) if the 45W TDP isn’t too scary to them.