No offense, but benchmarks and comparing them on paper is useless. I'm talking real life. Being in the business I pretty much get to play with any type of computer gear on the market or coming out. Even the lowly G3258 (which is actually an amazingly overclockable CPU matching an i5 almost) will run circles around a celeron based system of the same specs. Loading even basic IE, chrome, MS Office software, forget gaming or anything intensive even. I never recommend celerons to any customers even if they are cheap as heck. You get what you pay for. Now if we were to compare an I5 vs an I7 based system, yes, there would be little difference. Between a celeron and an i5 as you mention is crazy to even compare.
I'm not sure why you're assuming i'm not. I have a i3 too, and i get 10% cpu usage. I get 0.2x refresh rate actual seconds on it. Just as i do on the Celeron.
If you have your farm refresh set at 200 but it still pulls 7.xx seconds, something is wrong. Does your window ever refresh/write the text slowly with a slight delay? That's a sign of CPU under-performance right there. You can make up for it with more RAM and fast SSD, but eventually it slows things down still.
On my rigs I have them set at 200 also, local network mining is under 0.25seconds and pool mining is under 0.45seconds.
I over spec my rigs, yes (all running on AMD FX-6 core, or intel I5 cpu's, but they are fast as all heck.
Is that so? You say 7.xx seconds but the farm refresh is actually truly every 0.2 seconds, you can see this on the screenshot. The 7.XX seconds is not the farm refresh, its the round running time. You can see on the screenshot, that (and not that i mind it) but you're just bashing for the sake of bashing, since on the right, if pay attention, you will see the .2 seconds steps.
7.107 s
7.31 s
7.522 s
Looks pretty damn close to 0.2 to me.
And i get some slowdowns when writing DAG only.
So if you want to pay 200$ for a CPU, thats you, but i dont have any problem with the 40$ CPU, especially since on the permanent setup, they will all be running on custom linux distro.