Upgrade advice

[ddka]

I was thinking of upgrading my CPU to an Athlon 3000+, would the performance increase be noticable ?




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ASUS A7N8X mb
Athlon XP1900+
Samsung PC2700 512mb
MSI FX5900xt Geforce 4 128mb
Thermaltake 480 watt ps
Windows XP SP2

[bombledmonk]

In a nutshell I'd say you wouldn't see enough of a performance increase to warranty spending $175 on it. For a little more than that price you can upgrade to a 3100+ Sempron and a Socket 754 motherboard.

For much less than that price you can get a Mobile Athlon XP 2400+ and a decent CPU heatsink/fan and instantly set it to run at 2.2Ghz (3200+ speeds) http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProduc...103-400&depa=1


A heatsink like this would be great paired with a fan of your choice.
http://svc.com/si97-amd-21.html

or possibly this
http://svc.com/a1745.html


Puting something like that together would cost around $110-120 or so and bring a bigger performance boost than the 3000+. Even more if you wanted to get into some good overclocking.

[roley]

The answer to the question in absolute terms is that the Athlon XP 3000 will perform much better than the 1900....more cache and more clock speed.

However, the market sweet spot has definitely shifted to the Athlon 64 2800. Paired with even a micro ATX mobo (cheaper) it will perform even better than a simple XP CPU upgrade.

In Australia now, the Sempron 3100 is not that much different in price to the A64 2800, so that is what I recommend to clients.

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If you want to do a simple upgrade on your system, an Athlon XP 2600 or 2800 might be a better value option. It will give you excellent speed on appz and stuff and ok performance on 3D games when paired with a capable AGP card.

The reason I say this is that the price jump is still way too great from the 2800 to the 3000 and 3200....

The thing to watch is that you may need to do a BIOS update on your motherboard in order to have it properly recognize and support the new CPU. And this can sometimes be a pain.

Roley
Black Frog Tech