The barton core was good but not great. Personal preference here but i skip bartons entirely except xpm 2500+. a64 s754 is superior and feels more of a upgrade after t-bred. Dont get me wrong they still have a place but to me it was nothing new at the time.

The jump in l2 and fsb always helps . Some might argue well barton is the best because of that. But it was the last reiteration of the axp still being stuck with just having sse and no sse2 support doesnt make it that much special to play games. Dont sweat the bs run what u brung you will be fine.

Well if you are building one i would skip toa64 aswell, i'm currently working on a build for windows xp that have low cost and can be upgraded to a really awesome windows xp build.
Later this week i should finish the project and pos ton my channel.
I also did one video upgrading one tbred 1700+ to a barton 2800+, but i did just for the fun of upgrading.
Other thing that make me recommend the a64 is that it is not a power hog on the 5v rail, so more modern psu can handle it well.

Hmmm. For me, I have my original Windows XP machine and it had an Athlon XP 1800+ Palomino core and I on the cheap upgraded to a 3200+ Barton core version. But I think where I really saw my improvement was the fact that I changed the ram from 512MB of DDR-266 and a 133MHz FSB to 2GB of DDR-400 with a 166MHz FSB. That means the RAM went from an effective 266MHz to 333MHz. And quadrupling the space allowed Windows XP SP3 to really breathe. Then the speed of the CPU was made apparent. And considering that the 3200+ Barton is about the fastest CPU that motherboard will support, I'm good except for my AGP 4x limitation. That makes it very hard to find really good gaming cards that will work on it. I want to get my hands on a Radeon 9800 Pro. I'd REALLY like the XT version, but those are super-hard to find working. I have a Radeon x700 but it doesn't boot in the system - most likely because it's limited to AGP 8x specifications with the 0.8v signal voltage.

I used an older 480W power supply just because it was made for heavy 5V use. I also have a couple dual Athlon MP boards but they are 266 FSB.
Have plenty of 754 motherboards but was wondering what a top end Athlon XP would be like.

I have a 2800+ that does 166 FSB by default. I wanted to pair it with DDR400 on an nForce2 board so I bumped the FSB to 200 and lowered the multiplier to keep the internal clock about the same, and it works great. Strangely the BIOS now reports it is a 3000+.

The 200MHz (DDR400) FSB versions were not "the ones to have" in my opinion. In the golden days one would have a 1600+ to 2000+ with 133MHz (DDR266) or a 2600+ Thoroughbred or 2800/3000+ Barton with 166MHz (DDR333) FSB. The faster FSB on the high-end models didn't improve much IMHO (and the other way around, a 2600+ with 133MHz (DDR266) would be bottlenecked in some scenario's). Or course a 2100+ Palomino or 2500+ Barton runs fine but the latter runs just a bit better with a higher clock frequency.

In all cases it's a good idea to pair the system with equally clocked memory and preferably with a low latency. Back in the day I ran my 1700+ Thoroughbred at 2.5GHz+ paired up with CL2 memory and it felt really snappy and performed very well 😀.

Thandor wrote:

In all cases it's a good idea to pair the system with equally clocked memory and preferably with a low latency. Back in the day I ran my 1700+ Thoroughbred at 2.5GHz+ paired up with CL2 memory and it felt really snappy and performed very well 😀.

I still have my 1700+ TBred B running cool at 2.1Ghz (was 2.0 for a while) in my NF7-S 2.0 with a Thermalright SK-7 and an 80mm Panaflo I had to solder a connector onto. It's been that way for 14 years. Not bad for $50 CPU. 😊

There is no difference as such from CPUs with 333 or 400 MHz FSB. Barton, Thorton and Thoroughbred all ships for 400MHz FSB though FSB was never locked so in essence any chip can run at any FPS assuming you can get the multiplier to a workable level. The multiplier are locked though some motherboards could unlock them and there was always the old conductive pen trick as well.

Cores with 512KB L2 are slightly quicker than cores with only 256KB L2. However this fact was taken in to account on PR numbers. So if we look at Athlon XP 2600+ chips with 333 MHz FSB the 512KB chips run at 1917 MHz and the 256KB chips run at 2083 MHz.

Memory speed makes an even smaller impact in gaming with the difference from DDR 333 to DDR 400 being only one or possibly two FPS on a game like Comanche 4. Unlike gaming some memory hungry professionally applications did show fair gains from faster memory though still the Pentium 4 and later the Athlon 64 were substantially superior in this department.