i'm building a SFF for my parents and have decided on the Aopen EZ65. problem is that i've always bought AMD in the past, so i'm a little behind on intel CPU's (i actually had an EZ18 - the AMD version of the EZ65 - but it was damaged in shipping and the HSF wasn't as nice or quiet as the EZ65... and most places are out of stock of the black version so i just said to hell with it). so i'm looking for a recommendation of a good CPU for this purpose. they'll use it mostly for email, web, and some office stuff. the most complicated thing they'll use is Pagemaker. quiet may not be critical to them, but i'd at least like to make it quieter than the noisy, dying compaq they have now. i plan on installing winXP.

the cheapest non-Celeron at newegg is the P4 1.8 northwood. but its $106. they have some celeron's for much less than that (maybe i could get more ram if i spent less on the CPU). is there anything wrong with those CPU's? i thought i had heard that they ran overly hot or something, but i'm not sure. anyway, i just want to make a decent, fairly quiet choice here. any recommendations?

P4 1.8 northwood is perfect. Forget the Celerons, very poor performance.

ok, thanks for the tip. i might spring for the 2.0 since its only $3 more, unless thats somehow a bad idea.

so how can intel say "here, our 2.6 GHz CPU's are great and cheap!" when talking about a p4 celeron, if a lower clock speed non-celeron is a better performer?

I can't quite answer the above question - understanding Intel's logic is ... well - a feat beyond me. Marketing ... bleh.

Anyway, the point MikeC is very true - a 2.4 GHz Celeron will perform (roughly) like a P4 1.4-1.6 GHz - yes, it *IS* that bad. P4 is hungry not only for Memory bandwidth, but also cache - and the Celery's mesely 128 kb L2 are just starving it.

Get the P4 2.0 GHz (just make sure it's the Northwood - 0.13 micron, not Wilamette - 0.18 micron, as Northwood has 512 KB L2 cache, over Wilamette's 256 KB). It's a pretty nifty CPU - most of my work-lab PC's have it, and it's a good soldier .