Celeron is simply a crippled version of Intel Pentium. Some things have been omitted and some marketing strategy has been implemented. This can be tallied easily by appearance. If you compare an Intel Celeron and Pentium (of the same family of course.) side by side, they look almost identical. Using a CPU identifier, you will see that every feature that Intel Pentium has is also present in Celeron....
My experience will be that when doing all calculations such as executing commands and coding, speed is the same as Intel Pentium. So when you are playing games, the frame rate will be within 90 percent that of its Pentium brother. So this also implies that playing your high quality movies will not be affected, things will be as snappy as Pentium. Web pages speed will be as fast.
However, penalty hits Celeron when you are doing file transfer. You can prove this yourself. Try transferring a 1 gig file from one media to another; compare the time taken by Celeron with Pentium. The L2 cache really makes the difference. If Pentium takes 5 minutes to transfer a file, Celeron will take a strolling 6.5 minutes. That means a 20% percent speed difference. This difference will narrow down to about 10% when you are gaming or editing movies where the CPU is doing different tasks simultaneously. This fact is extremely logical. For head to head clock speed, Celeron is identical with the Pentium. This means all calculation is done within the same time interval.
However, to transfer the calculated info to and fro other devices, the crippled L2 cache will slow down the transfer rate. So exactly what is the cache? It is a lot faster and more expensive type of ram which is built into processor itself to quick up data transfer processes.
Is it worth it?
In every aspect, I think it is worth it. Celeron is a very subjective processor; it is just Pentium itself with the crippled cache. So you mainly sacrifice 10% of the system performance with a price 1/2 or 1/4 that of similarly clocked Pentium. However, Celeron is progressing very slowly on the market. When Intel Pentium is reaching 3 GHz barrier and hyper-threading, Intel Celeron is only at 2 GHz but at a price which is one third of the 2 GHz Pentium. This is the marketing strategy implemented by Intel to dull the image of Celeron and unfortunately, it works. So the choice is yours. To keep on following the trend of the pc market donating lots of cash or extremely functional processing power which save you a lot of cash.
I have no idea how you are going to play along with Intel marketing plans but when the hard times come by, you will appreciate the Celeron, the Intel based savior.
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