for gaming the prescott is faster, for anything else excluding SSE2 required software the dual athlon system will be faster. HT especially back then was not a good replacement for dual CPU.

thanks - is there any way to tell whether software needs sse2 [other than finding it won't run on a cpu that doesn't support the instructions]?

you can ask about it, i know for sure that chrome requires SSE2

Unfortunately very few early games take advantage of dual-cpu / dual-core setup, so the prescott will be faster.

The Dual Athlon XP/MP system is more fun but for actual use I would choose the Prescott.

Prescott will be faster for gaming, and anything else that's single-thread/single-core bound. It also supports SSE2/3, which started to become a factor for gaming around 2005 IME. Most modern software and operating systems have started to require SSE2 as well, which will kick the Athlon out (and if I'm not mistaken, the 640 also supports EM64T, which the Athlon will not). IME earlier applications can live without it, but there's a performance penalty as opposed to out-and-out "fails to run." Also remember that all AthlonMP are 266MHz FSB, which is not to their advantage performance wise. If you need better multi-threaded performance, see if the 775 board will support a Pentium D or Core 2, and swap the Prescott out for that.

Thanks for all the info! It seems sticking with the prescott is right for my particular purposes.

Hey the dual Athlon XP could make a cool retro game server for the games you will be playing on the Prescott 😀

I have a few dual boards with dual p3-450, dual tualatin 1400's and dual athlon xp 2200+ laying around.

None of them ofcourse have any use with 98se and there are simply much better options when going with windows xp so i just can't find a good use for them.

I got them cheap so i had to have them because they are cool 🤣

It's a shame the athlon xp's don't support sse2.

I agree, only once your running WinXP do Duel CPU's really become any use and even then only slightly.
But they are incredibly sexy

well NT4 and 2000 can use both cpu's

Skyscraper wrote:

The Dual Athlon XP/MP system is more fun but for actual use I would choose the Prescott.

As an owner of a dual Athlon board with 2 2800+ CPUs as well, as much as I really enjoy this system and am glad I put it together, I still have to agree with this statement.