From AthlonXP to Athlon64

[* * Chas]

On Mon, 27 Feb 2006 23:11:36 -0600, Larry Roberts wrote:

Waiting is the right thing to do, your current system is nearly as fast as
the state of the art single core systems so you won't get much benefit
from doing an upgrade unless you can afford a dual core system. Adding
memory to your current system will give you your biggest bang for the
buck, if you have less then 1G you should add 512 or 1G.

Waiting a few months to buy hardware saves money. Back in 1998 when the
CPU wars were heating up and the AMD K6-2 300 was the hot ticket, they
first sold for ~$400 USD. In 6 months time they were under $150 and
within a year, less than $80! They could OC to over 400MHz with the
Chomper core (the later K6-3 300 CPUs).

I just built an "end game" Win98SE box with an Asus K8N-E, Athlon 64
3000+ and 1G of memory. I do mostly business and office applications,
Internet, some light sound editing, light graphics and 2D CAD.

This seems to be the latest hardware supported by Win98SE which I prefer
over other MS OSes. For my applications the new box is not that much
faster than my A7M-266 with an Athlon XP 1800+ and 768MB of memory which
isn't that much faster than my K7M, 1G T-Bird with 384MB of memory. I
dual boot to Win2k for applications that don't work with Win98SE and I
have several laptops with XP for wireless support.

I use my PCs for work so I can expense them out. I could have built a
bleeding edge system but I'm waiting to see what advantage 64bit
programs will bring for me; 64bit XP is a paid for developmental product
just like WFWG3.11 was for Win95. My next move will probably be to Linux
when they get a few more issues straightened out like installing and
upgrading software. I tried a few distros lately and Linux is almost
there.

Chas.

 

[VanShania]

I found a Gigabyte GA-K8NSC-939 board that I hope to get instead, if they
still have it in stock. AGP boards are getting hard to find.

--
XP2600@171 [email protected]
PC3200 Samsung 512mb, SB Live OEM
AIW9600XT, A7N8X-X
WD120gb + 80gb HD 8mb buffers
Plextor PX-712A, Liteon 1693S 16X Dual Layer
Pioneer DVR-110D 16X - 4X Dual Layer
Thermaltake Lanfire, 420 Watt PS
ViewSonic 19" A91f+ CRT
Micrsoft Sidewinder Precision 2 Joystick

Overall Score-2066, cpu_score-2926
in 3DMark2005 basic 1078X768, No AA

 

[Joe]

Larry I am in almost the same boat you are in. I have a XP2800 barton core
which is almost what you have. I have researched this a lot. Here is a link
to a very good comparison.

http://www.tomshardware.com/2005/11/21/the_mother_of_all_cpu_charts_2005/

After hours of reading on this subject I have decided to wait because I want
to see a very noticeable improvement when I upgrade as I have a similar
budget to you. When I upgrade I want to double everything meaning I want a
good 100% upgrade in speed. Much less than that is just not going to be
extremely noticeable to me, certainly nothing less than a 50% improvement.
The way I read the charts it would take about an Athlon64 4000 or X2 3800 to
double things. With an Athlon 64 3200 I think you would see about a 25%
improvement which to me is not worth the money.
I figure I will be upgrading about this time next year as by then the M2
boards will have been out about 6 months and I figure the 939 will be down
to a leave I can afford.
Joe

 

[Lenster]

I upgraded from an ABIT NF7-s XP2800 Barton to
An Opteron 165, an ASROCK dual 939 MB and an Arctic Freezer 64. I
kept my AGP card and my 2x1G DDr3200 ram.
It was under $500.

I overclocked the Opteron to 2340Mhz and benchmarks show more than a
2x improvement. More importantly (to me anyway) with dual core, when I
run a video convert I still have a computer that is useable.

you can find lots of info on the cpu/mb here.
http://www.ocworkbench.com/ocwbcgi/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=forum;f=30;hardset=0;start_point=0;DaysPrune=0

I have also included an excel worksheet with the benchmarks from my
original XP2800 and results at various overclock stages of the new
board/cpu.

I guess it all depends on how tired you are of your old system.

 

[Hawk]

The Athlon 4200 X2 is the best cpu for the buck. Its only 10% slower than
the 4800 X2 and is $100 cheaper than 4400 X2, whicn is only 2% faster than a
4200 X2. The 4400 X2 is a poor choice and will leave you feeling cheap and
used.

This is the same conclusion I came to in building a new system a couple of weeks
ago.

I am running my 4200 @ 2.4G with stock Vcore and absolutely no change in operating
temperature. I am getting 4600+ speed for $200 less than a genuine 4600+ without
putting any noticable strain on it. I have no doubt that I could exceed stock
4800+ speeds if I choose to. The 4400+ @ $100 more just didn't seem worth it to
me. From what I've been reading...on average the entire series starts to crap out
@ 2.7G on air cooling anyways, so it's not like a 4800+ is going to clock
significantly higher than a 4200. In most cases the extra cache is only worth a
couple percent improvement, except on certain cache specific benchmarks. The
downside to the larger cache is that they run hotter (more transistors switching =
more heat).


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