Would a Pentium 4 651 be much faster than a celeron 440?

Question

I have an old dell computer with a socket 775 motherboard which currently has a celeron 440 2.0 ghz Conroe-L installed
I just use it with windows XP for older games/programs that aren't compatible with Vista/7 (Pretty much just single threaded things)

I just want to get better overall performance and don't want to spend much money on it.
So I thought a Pentium 4 Cedar Mill 3.4ghz with hyper threading would be a great upgrade for just 20$
But something that confused me was a site I found with benchmark scores and it gives a better score to celeron 440 than Pentium 3.4 ghz. Link below
http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_list.php

That doesn't really make sense to me because they are both 65nm processors but the P4 has a much higher clock speed, 2mb of l2 cache and hyper threading. The celeron only has 512k of l2 cache. And I have always heard that celeron are the worst processors ever made and perform worse than their pentium counterparts even at the same frequency.

So why would the site show the celeron as being better? Are there versions of the P4 that are allot slower?
Any help will be appreciated I just want to make sure that I'll actually be upgrading the CPU and not spending money to get slightly slower performance. 

And yes, I know neither that processor is much good by today's standards and I could upgrade to a core2duo  but for what I use the computer for it would never be worth it. And I already have a much better pc but I use my old one for reasons stated above.

C-Man · Accepted Answer

No, newer generation dual-core Celerons beat any single-core Pentium 4.  Clock speeds by themselves aren't meaningful because the Conroe core is more efficient and performs more work per clock cycle.  Even in tasks which don't utilize the additional core, the Celeron 440 will outperform the P4.

Here's a detailed performance comparison between the Celeron 440 and a 3.6Ghz Pentium 4 660- at this point the older chip does score slightly higher on some tests. But I'd still consider it a lateral move at best, not an upgrade because single-core processors suffer dramatic performance hits whenever ANY background task kicks in.  That's a real-world consideration not reflected in the benchmarks.  I'd stand pat.

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/72?vs=92

The old crippled cachless Celerons from the Pentium III and Pentium 4 era are the ones with the reputation of "worst processors ever", which they arguably yielded to AMD's Semprons.
 
Intel simply resurrected the Celeron brand-name but applied it to completely different CPUs, but people see the name "Celeron" and assume the worst.

Erika · Answer

The P4 is the quickest. Celeron is a affordable line of processors and the title will get appended to the low finish processors in all of the strains. What you must let us know is -- are they socket 468 or socket 775, that could resolve plenty for us techies. AAS Computer Networking

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Would a Pentium 4 651 be much faster than a celeron 440?

2 Answers