IMO, better to spend the extra cash and get the Athlon XP. The extra cache makes a big difference.

2800Mhz heh? hehehe.

Exactly. That's 1GHz (approx) more than what I currently have. 😎

After this final upgrade, I will have to invest in a new motherboard.

eL_PuSHeR wrote:

Exactly. That's 1GHz (approx) more than what I currently have. 😎

Not really. More like the half of 1GHz. The AMD 1800+ XP runs at 1533MHz and the AMD 2800+ XP Barton runs at 2083Ghz.

I think you are wrong. My Athlon XP 1800+ is running at 1152,61MHz (real).

eL_PuSHeR wrote:

I think you are wrong. My Athlon XP 1800+ is running at 1152,61MHz (real).

Then you must be running the FSB at 100 instead of the intended 133. Change it in the BIOS.

How can I check it? It is safe to change it in bios?

PS - I think you are right....

Edit3: I fixed it in BIOS. Yay! Everything seems to be working properly. Thank you for pointing it out to me. I would have never noticed. 😎

maybe you don't need a new cpu now 😀
you speed it 33 % allready 😀

My XP 2800 is 167.05X13.5=2215.12.

Have had it since Sept 2002. Very good investment. Always thought about buying a newer processor but there's really not much point. The XP 2800 is still very powerful and enough to run even the latest games, unless of course your an FPS nut who requires the highest FPS you can get.

That's an old ver of WCPUID by the wat.

Hrm, I've been running a Duron 1.6 and considering getting an XP 2800 as well (266 fsb, though, which seem to be a real pain to get hold of). It's $22 between that and an XP 2600, though ($94 and $116 respectively) - reckon it's worth spending that extra cash?

Not if your system doesn't support the higher FSB 😀

It only supports 266, but I can get 2600 or 2800 at that.

Ah, sorry, I see what you're saying now. For $22, you might as well get the extra boost. I think that the largish price differential may be due to use of a different core in the 2800 versus the 2600. It may also be very limited price gouging of the resellers knowing that you're gonna want the most power you can get on that FSB 😉

I think the 2800 (Barton core) has a whooping 512KB L2 cache vs my 256KB (XP 1800) and vs the Duron I have at work which is 64KB

My mobo doesn't handle Barton, so that's something i have to be aware of when buying, I guess (it's an Asrock K7VT2, which supports "Thorton, Thoroughbred A/B and Palomino", so they say). I was quite surprised to find that there even was a 266 non-Barton processor that high, but apparently so...

Snover: your comment about price-gouging is one of the reasons I'm wary. It may be "just" $22, but it still seems a lot to me for a jump from 2133MHz to ~2250.

Thanks for the info.

Whatever core the Sempron uses is newer than the Barton.

I have had a Barton in both a KT266A and KT333-based boards. It will come up as unknown CPU but it will work fine. You just need to be able to set bus speed and multiplier in the BIOS or you'll be stuck at like 100FSB/6x = 600Mhz.

Best thing to do would be to get a mobile barton 2200+ for cheap and overclock the hell out of it. Mine is doing 2.2Ghz at a mere 1.6v!

If you want cheap, just make sure it's not a Duron and you'll be good to go. The extra cache on Barton doesn't make much difference at all honestly. You can read reviews if you like on that. It's not a big deal.

If your getting a new processor (and intend to use DosBox) I'd definetly get one with more L2 cache. Currently only have 256k so when I upgrade to a newer processor I'll definetly be going for at least a 1mb L2.

http://www.aceshardware.com/read.jsp?id=50000364

Another good example of L2 being less than defining of processor speed is that a Athlon 64 939 with 512k cache will beat my Athlon 64 754 with 1MB cache. The dual channel memory of the 939 chip more than makes up for the L2 cache size drop.

Pentium 4 is an example of a CPU that gets a lot of benefit from L2 cache size. Athlon XP and Athlon 64 don't get too much from it. Pentium M is also a good example of L2 helping a lot, but Intel's L2 cache's are absolute monsters in speed compared to AMD's and that's part of it. And that 2MB cache on Pentium M (Dothan) is pretty crazy huge.

swaaye wrote:

If you want cheap, just make sure it's not a Duro

"You see, we've already got one!"

Not sure what your issue is with them, to be honest, they're a bit long in the tooth now, but if you want cheap - and I mean cheap - they're still not that bad. Mine deals handily with most of the stuff I've thrown at it, anyway; but then, I'm not running the latest greatest.

That's why I'm on VOGONS, see :]