Tetrium wrote:

Personally I love my Socket A rigs (with the top one being an Athlon XP 3200+ on a KT600 motherboard, 2GiB DDR-400, GF7600GS and (don't laugh 😜) a slow but very silent 100GB ATA laptop drive 😀

It is only this year that I am retiring two Socket A sempron 3000+'s. Well, one may stay in place a little longer, but the other one had to let go of its casing. They are a little too power hungry, compared to a modern Intel system (Pentium G620). I noted: 120 Watt vs 65 Watt (Intel HD) vs 77 Watt (Radeon 6450) , running a 3D game.

The KT600 is OK, quite reliable. I equipped it with a much younger AGP Radeon 3450. The Radeon is very particular about its driver version in Windows 2000, It runs my games, but will not finish 3Dmark2001.
The KT400 disappointed me with its bugged support of Halt and StpGnt instructions. These instructions cut the socket A CPU power usage significantly, using Cool-On or something similar. But there is a side effect on the KT400: it degraded the harddisk performance.

The Sempron 3000+ is in every way a normal Athlon XP Barton core, and could be called "Athlon XP 2700+". With a small bonus of running at just 1,65 Volt by default.

gerwin wrote:

It is only this year that I am retiring two Socket A sempron 3000+'s. Well, one may stay in place a little longer, but the other […]
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Tetrium wrote:

Personally I love my Socket A rigs (with the top one being an Athlon XP 3200+ on a KT600 motherboard, 2GiB DDR-400, GF7600GS and (don't laugh 😜) a slow but very silent 100GB ATA laptop drive 😀

It is only this year that I am retiring two Socket A sempron 3000+'s. Well, one may stay in place a little longer, but the other one had to let go of its casing. They are a little too power hungry, compared to a modern Intel system (Pentium G620). I noted: 120 Watt vs 65 Watt (Intel HD) vs 77 Watt (Radeon 6450) , running a 3D game.

The KT600 is OK, quite reliable. I equipped it with a much younger AGP Radeon 3450. The Radeon is very particular about its driver version in Windows 2000, It runs my games, but will not finish 3Dmark2001.
The KT400 disappointed me with its bugged support of Halt and StpGnt instructions. These instructions cut the socket A CPU power usage significantly, using Cool-On or something similar. But there is a side effect on the KT400: it degraded the harddisk performance.

The Sempron 3000+ is in every way a normal Athlon XP Barton core, and could be called "Athlon XP 2700+". With a small bonus of running at just 1,65 Volt by default.

I'm still using a Socket A and a couple s754 rigs for my LAN parties. They may be relatively energy consuming for todays standards, but as I have to make due with what I have, these will have to do.
I never knew about KT400 having slow disk performance. I'll keep that in mind 😉

Btw, I think I measured their power consumption before and they were at around 70W?

Btw I just remembered, my Socket A doesn't have a GF7600GS, but a HD4670 with 1GiB memory. A bit overkill but it works well enough 😀

There is also a Socket A Sempron 3100+

It's an OEM CPU and needs the higher FSB (was it 200 or 400)? Also clocked 100 MHz higher.

But apparently almost no boards have BIOS support for this chip 😀

I also had a VIA 400 board. It was one from Asrock, pretty sure this one:

www.asrock.com/mb/overview.asp?Model=K7VT4A%2b

I used with a Radeon 9700 and it was flawless. I was very impressed with this system and it was a shame when I sold it. But I had to because I moved to Australia 😀

Interesting, I tried to google the Sempron 3100+. But I guess you meant 3300+.
http://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/K7/TYPE-Sempron.html

@tetrium,
I am pretty sure I measured the wattage properly, in several stages: boot, idle, 3D game, etc.

Here is my former KT400 system, and the Halt issue. StpGnt still worked.
Socket-A AMD Athlon/Sempron system

I read somewhere the performance gain of the 200Mhz (400 DDR) bus was not too impressive, compared to the 166/333 Bus. So I never bothered to upgrade further.

Yea that's the one!