VOGONS


First post, by candle_86

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So I got an Athlon 850 based PC (yes shes annoyed but I'm putting in the trunk for now, after I pull the hard drive. It has a Thunderbird 850, I know for a fact I can get an Athlon 1400C locally for 3 dollars, and the board is a KT266A ECS board so it will support it just fine, it actually supports all Athlon XP's up to XP2800+ on a 266mhz FSB. Do yall think its worth it? And I want Athlon, I have an Athlon XP 2800+ Barton already 🤣

Reply 1 of 7, by obobskivich

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For $3, and assuming it has decent cooling, why not?

Reply 2 of 7, by candle_86

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just wondering really if its worth it, will it at 1400 still be destinct from my XP 2800 and P4 3.2

Reply 3 of 7, by bjt

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1400C will be much faster than an 850B, up to 50% I imagine. Just make sure the cooler can handle it.

Reply 4 of 7, by obobskivich

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candle_86 wrote:

just wondering really if its worth it, will it at 1400 still be destinct from my XP 2800 and P4 3.2

"Distinct" how? Neither it, nor the 850MHz, nor the XP 2800, will support SSE2. Like the 850, it will also not support SSE, and has no hardware pre-fetch. It will be faster than the 850 across the board though. None of these will be appropriate for say, speed sensitive DOS games - you'd need something much, much older (e.g. 486) for that. For late-90s to early-00s DX6/7/8/9 gaming, any of these would be a good candidate depending on what graphics card and other hardware you paired up.

If you want an all-in-one solution, the P4 will probably be the best bet, but Athlon can still make a nice system, and it is something a little different from the typical NetBurst machine.

Reply 5 of 7, by candle_86

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distinct in that it wont feel similar to my XP or P4 when using it, I have my K6-3 for old games 🤣

Reply 6 of 7, by obobskivich

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candle_86 wrote:

distinct in that it wont feel similar to my XP or P4 when using it

I think ultimately you would have to make that judgment. It's going to be somewhat slower than either of those machines, even with the 1400 T-Bird, but we aren't talking extreme differences - the 1.4GHz T-Bird will be competitive with top-tier Pentium 3s, ~2GHz P4s, and early Palomino AthlonXPs, as long as SSE is not a concern. With the right graphics card, it could easily handle early 2000s games without much fuss. One thing it may better support, depending on the motherboards you have, is 3.3V AGP cards - most P4 boards will only support 1.5V cards, and many AthlonXP boards are the same. Now, whether or not there is a 3.3V AGP card that stands out for you, is really up to you and what you want out of the machine.

Reply 7 of 7, by shamino

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The 1.4GHz TBird has some amount of interest going for it just because it's the fastest chip using that core. For $3 I wouldn't blink at buying it, but the gas driving down there is a bigger variable than the $3. CPUs take no space to store.