You have the KT880 board or plan to look for one?

There is no faster and no better chipset for the Athlon XP, than the NF2 Ultra 400. And if you want to squeeze out the max of the socket A platform, NF2 is the way to go. With the proper hardware, you'll be able to hit 230-240 FSB(I've never seen a stable NF2 at 250FSB), and 2.8 - 3 Ghz for the CPU. (Barton Mobiles, or Semprons with the Barton core)

The real question is - why would you need it? If you check a few posts above - the real issue is the lack of SSE2. The CPU itself (especially when overclocked to 2.8-3Ghz), has enough raw computing power.

elianda wrote:

Coming back to topic:

Someone has experience what the gain from upgrading a KT600 to the KT880 chipset was (except Dual Channel support) ?

Here is a shout out between KT880 and Nforce2.
Although I dont have any experience with KT880 I have to say the performance look good.

http://techreport.com/review/6646/via-kt880-chipset/2

I would say it's retro simply because it's the last AMD chip family not to be based on x64. AMD basically stole the 64-bit computing market away from Intel's Itanium by retaining backward compatibility with 32-bit x86 instructions. So Athlon 64 ushered us into the modern age, while Athlon XP was the last remnant of the old guard.

Space Cowboy wrote:

You have the KT880 board or plan to look for one?

There is no faster and no better chipset for the Athlon XP, than the NF2 Ultra 400. And if you want to squeeze out the max of the socket A platform, NF2 is the way to go. With the proper hardware, you'll be able to hit 230-240 FSB(I've never seen a stable NF2 at 250FSB), and 2.8 - 3 Ghz for the CPU. (Barton Mobiles, or Semprons with the Barton core)

The real question is - why would you need it? If you check a few posts above - the real issue is the lack of SSE2. The CPU itself (especially when overclocked to 2.8-3Ghz), has enough raw computing power.

I was just asking about some first hand experiences. According to the linked techreport comparison the KT880 seems in fact faster than the NF2U which contradicts your statement. It is not that I want to get a KT880 board, as I wrote earlier I have a Barton 3200+ running on a NF2U chipset on stock speeds with a rather nice setup. It was just that the KT880 was very late and only really present in the OEM market. At this time most enthusiast people already went for e.g. an A64.
I don't see much use in overclocking since I also have faster systems and the gain compared with the instability problems that arise is way too small. Also the normal Barton 3200+ runs already quite hot and OC would reduce the lifetime exponentially. So OC and how much FSB may be reached etc. is no topic for me here. I value much more a rock solid stable system you can rely on.

Yep, I saw your post about your NF2, and that's what made me ask why would one ever want a KT880 ...

Honestly, I have no first hand experience with KT880 - I doubt many people do have, cause it was released too late, but ... I remember that my KT400 was great, and my friend's KT600 was a total nightmare (speaking of an Asus board). As a whole, VIA chipsets were not famous for being fast, and many of them were not that ... "reliable". They were ... hm, cheaper. (so what - that's a point for VIA)

But there is no such thing as "instability" with the overclock - I still use (in my main desktop PC) a C2D E8300 @ 4.2Ghz on air. Runs rock stable with 8GB ram. And I have less issues with it (I have no issues with it), compared to my i5 laptop.

Overclocking is an industry of it's own - darn, I paid ~140$ for my Epox 8rda3+ back then. And it was top grade.

Give me the price of a high grade motherboard today, and tell me if it's not only because of those fancy OC features, solid capacitors, shiny heatsinks, etc 😀

Computers are getting cheaper and cheaper, but still some brands manage to sell 400$ motherboards ...

Sorry for the offtopic, people 😀

Space Cowboy wrote:

Overclocking is an industry of it's own - darn, I paid ~140$ for my Epox 8rda3+ back then. And it was top grade. […]
Show full quote

Overclocking is an industry of it's own - darn, I paid ~140$ for my Epox 8rda3+ back then. And it was top grade.

Give me the price of a high grade motherboard today, and tell me if it's not only because of those fancy OC features, solid capacitors, shiny heatsinks, etc 😀

Computers are getting cheaper and cheaper, but still some brands manage to sell 400$ motherboards ...

Sorry for the offtopic, people 😀

I think the big motherboard manufacturers often often sell their top grade boards at a loss. Today is no diffrent from yesterday.
Small production series and expensive componentes is not a good way to earn money but its a great way to make your brand known and liked.

Since late s775-era even the cheap motherboards have good quality though.

Space Cowboy wrote:

Honestly, I have no first hand experience with KT880 - I doubt many people do have, cause it was released too late, but ...

KT600 and KT880 did seem late and pointless. I used a Abit KW7 for awhile (KT880) and it was stable and reliable. But VIA setups feel somewhat lethargic to me with WinXP and I think it may be that their IDE controller is slower in some way. In the case of the KW7 I was using the annoying VIA SATA controller (VT8237) that won't recognize SATA2 drives unless you can configure them to SATA1.

nForce2 Ultra 400 is my preferred AXP chipset but I tend to only use my KT333 board because it can host any AGP card.

I'd say so since it's a decade old already, it's single-core, and the lack of SSE2 has led to some rude surprises when trying to run certain software.

The rest of my family is still using some crappy Compaq desktop with an Athlon XP 1800+ Palomino and 512 MB of DDR-266. It's painfully slow, especially visiting any modern Web page with Flash on it. I already tired of it back at the end of 2007, when I finally made the leap to a Core 2 Quad Q6600. (Now that I have a Core i7-4770K machine, they'll probably be getting that Q6600 system just to have something decently responsive for once.)

I have another Athlon XP box based on parts that were given to me for free, an Asus A7N8X-E Deluxe and an Athlon XP 3200+ (Barton, green package, 200/400 MHz FSB), under the pretense that the motherboard was dead. The only problem with it was that the CR2032 CMOS battery was dead; replace that, and it worked just fine! (Well, until I installed a pair of 1 GB DDR-400 DIMMs. Had to flash a BIOS modded to 2T command rate just to keep it stable.)

That system was going to be my Windows XP-era gaming system, but then I decided to build a Pentium 4 3.2 GHz system once I learned that 875P boards with fully-functional ISA slots existed. Right now, the Athlon XP 3200+ system is just sitting in a closet, waiting for a purpose.

NamelessPlayer wrote:

... once I learned that 875P boards with fully-functional ISA slots existed.

Btw (offtopic again) what's the board you are using? I was hoping to find a Supermicro P4SCA - got a couple of 3.0 Prescotts here - one of them atm is in a P4SPA+, and I'm really pleased with the quality of the Supermicro boards.

Space Cowboy wrote:

NamelessPlayer wrote:

... once I learned that 875P boards with fully-functional ISA slots existed.

Btw (offtopic again) what's the board you are using? I was hoping to find a Supermicro P4SCA - got a couple of 3.0 Prescotts here - one of them atm is in a P4SPA+, and I'm really pleased with the quality of the Supermicro boards.

I went with the BCM BC875PLG. Only one ISA slot, but that's all I really need.

www.bcmcom.com/bcm_search_results.asp?P ... 2=&asd=^54

(Huh, why aren't the URL tags working?)

My only complaint is that, despite what the manual says, I can't adjust the CPU multiplier or FSB at all. I can mess with RAM timings, but overclocking-or, more importantly for my uses with this system, UNDERclocking the CPU is out of the question.

While the Supermicro P4SCA looks interesting, the lack of an AGP slot is a deal-killer for me. The whole point of that build was that I wouldn't have to keep two machines for retro PC gaming, one dedicated to DOS/Win98SE (I was thinking a 1.4 GHz Pentium III-S there), the other dedicated to WinXP (the Athlon XP 3200+ box in question was planned to fill that role), and a GeForce 6800 Ultra goes a long way toward accomplishing that. I've got family members complaining that I keep too many computers in the house as is.

CPU-wise, it started with a 3.2 GHz Prescott, but now it's running a 3.2 GHz Gallatin (yes, Extreme Edition) that I scored for $10 recently. Ought to be fun to compare both of them with that 3200+ Barton at its peak some day, just to see how close AMD's performance rating really was.

Hm, I have compared 2.2 Ghz Athlon 256K L2 @ 200 FSB on NF2 with 3.0 Prescott @ stock (200x4) on a DELL PC with i875 chipset. But I don't keep screenshots - it was years ago.

Anyway, to the best of my memory, if you compare CPU to CPU - AMD was not close - clock per clock, it was way ahead of the Intel CPU. Athlon XP gave AMD a solid base for years ahead. I can't think of another CPU, that has been in production for so many years. (C2D, probably)

But i875 with PAT enabled showed far better memory handling and a much better overall performance.

That's why I prefer the Prescott, packed with an AGP Radeon HD2600XT and 2 GB of ram for a family PC - browsing, movies and alike - it's one of those rare setups, that are of "set it and forget it" type ...

I,m using this pc every day at work Retro Rig Photo Thread at 1 point i replace the videocard with a Msi made Geforce 7600gs agp with 512mb ram and passive cooling and it still does it's job ok:music,movies,internet browsing,only problem is hd youtube.

This is all from memory so do not take it as facts.
[edit] I just checked the screenshots so its not from memory but do not take it as facts anyhow[/edit]

I tested a P4 3.06@3450 and a Athlon XP Barton @2425 mhz

The Barton destroys the P4 in 3dmark 2000.
When it comes to 3dmark 2001 the Barton wins with most video cards but for some reason the P4 wins with a margin when a Geforce 6800GT is used.
The P4 is faster in 3dmark 2003, 3dmark 2005 and 3dmark 2006 but its not a huge diffrence.
SuperPi 1m is somewhat even with the Barton a little bit faster. (41s vs 43s)
The P4 wins in PCMark 2002 with a small margin
The Barton scores higher in Sisoft Sandra 99 with a small margin

The P4 was tested on an Asus 845PE board with single channel memory @ 200 mhz 2, 2, 2, 8 (hyper-threading on)
The Barton was tested on an Asus Nforce2 board with dual channel memory @ 220 mhz 2.5, 3, 3, 7

I think the P4 would score better in SuperPi, 3dmark 2000 and 3d mark 2001 if it had dual channel memory but Granite Bay and later Canterwood were more high end platforms and Springdale was up against K8 not Athlon XP.

To sum it up. There are no huge performance differences in the tests I used exept in 3dmark 2000 where the Barton totally destroys the P4.
In newer PCMark or Sisoft Sandra versions I would expect the P4 to win with a margin thanks to support for newer SSE standards.

edit spelling

Skyscraper wrote:

... Granite Bay and later Canterwood were more high end platforms and Springdale was up against K8 not Athlon XP.

I somewhat disagree with you on 2 matters.

1) Sure, K8 was released by the time Canterwood and Springdale chipsets were out, but ... Intell pulled out very soon their 915, 925 chipsets and the LGA775 socket.

The Prescott core for LGA775 had the Intel EM64T instructions, so I've always counted it as a direct competitor for the AMD's 64 bit CPUs.

2) Actually, the dual channel is what made the 875P shine. Further on - Cedar Mill on a 925XE was an incredibly fast combo, exactly because of the fast dual channel DDR2 (haha, it was 533, but it was damn fast).

But what I really want to point out is: From all that we wrote and all we read, it seems "Athlon XP" is not quite dead yet - on the contrary - it's still running in many home PC's, so ... we probably should not count it as "retro" 😀

I got really curious, and I'm gonna give my 8rda3+ a try with Windows 7 Home. (a month ago, I found a site that provides modified NF2 drivers, so it will be fun).

This is no exact science but I see it like this

During the winter 2002 - 2003 Intel 845PE and Nforce2 were the fastest platforms

Intel gets Canterwood and Pentium 4 with 800 fsb out before AMD releases K8 parts that are not aimed for servers and workstations so the Canterwood platform is without a rival the whole summer.

There wasnt a huge leap in time though before AMD released K8 CPUs aimed for gaming and performance freaks. The FX-51 for socket 940 was released in september 2003.
One month later socket 754* was released and I see this platform as the main rival against Canterwood and Springdale. Prescott for Socket 478 was released a few months after socket 754 but Northwood still performed better.

Year 2004 Intel released Grantsdale with socket 775 and AMD released socket 939. I see those platforms as the main rivals that year.

*I just call the platforms socket 754 and 939, I dont want to choose sides in the VIA vs Nvidia battle

That's okay, because Nforce3 is terrible. Bad LAN, and the 64-bit drivers are unstable. It isn't much of a "battle" considering that 😀

JaNoZ wrote:

I think it is indeed outdated but still usable.

I agree, if it can run windows 7 and surf the net it's good to go.

The Athlon XP 2800+ with 2GB of ram at my parents house is running Windows 7 and runs fine ever since I added a SATA card and a new video card about 2 years ago.

It can't run Windows 8 so when eventually 7 is long in the tooth I'll put whatever the latest supported linux distro is on there.

I don't think they use it anymore so I'll probably grab it some time and use it for compatibility testing.

I believe Crysis was playable at around 1024x768. Not sure what detail settings but probably medium.

It would be interesting to see what kind of a performance boost a SSD would provide....

leileilol wrote:

That's okay, because Nforce3 is terrible. Bad LAN, and the 64-bit drivers are unstable. It isn't much of a "battle" considering that 😀

nforce3 250 ultra for the 939 platform wasn't all that bad. What surprises me is how long NVidia took playing catch-up with the HT speeds. The only problem is, as you said, 64-bit drivers. NVidia were always good with driver support so that was rather interesting.

FYI, I find with older CPUs you want at least 1mb cache for 7 to run the best.