AHH The Good Old Days Of Barton :)

[Insomniator]

Wow I don't remember the AMD chips getting owned so hard by Intel Northwoods. I built a P4 3.0 northwood system for college in 04 only because that was the best deal I could get on a chip at my local shop (3.2 was way more $$$) but for some reason I remember XP's kicking ass.

I guess that was more towards when the first awful 1.5ghz wille's were out, and later when the crappy pentium D's came out vs the X2's..

[PliotronX]

tis why I tend to never sell hardware, hehe. I set up my Thoroughbred 1700+ DLT3C in a DFI Infinity II OC'd to 2500 with my voltmodded Radeon 9700 Pro in my mom's computer. Runs nicely.

[Arkaign]

Originally Posted by Insomniator

Wow I don't remember the AMD chips getting owned so hard by Intel Northwoods. I built a P4 3.0 northwood system for college in 04 only because that was the best deal I could get on a chip at my local shop (3.2 was way more $$$) but for some reason I remember XP's kicking ass.

I guess that was more towards when the first awful 1.5ghz wille's were out, and later when the crappy pentium D's came out vs the X2's..

Well, it's all relative. Yes, once the NW P4's hit the mid 2ghz range they started to outpace AXP, and by the time 3ghz was hit, AXP really started to fall behind. But the platform was more expensive, and people in the know could run a cheap mobile AXP or 2500+ at 3200+ speeds (rough 2.8Ghz P4C performance when mated to an NF2 chipset), which was a fairly good bargain, and far cheaper than a 2.8C/3.0C northwood+865 build. Of course, one could also pick the right lower-model P4, and hit ~3Ghz or beyond for cheap as well, which was my preference despite owning both.

But your post does make a lot of sense. People's memories of P4 are heavily affected by the poor start and poor ending of P4. P4 with socket 423 was stupidly expensive, not that fast, and a general pain in the butt due to RDRAM, then it was obsoleted almost immediately by S478. And the 400mhz FSB models never were very good. Willamette was mediocre in most repects, an AXP was just plain better, and far better when you factor cost. Then Northwood had a good long run of great performance and decent prices (outside of halo models), which served to be the meat of the P4 era. Then came the ridiculously disappointing Prescott, which was ill-timed to meet the new AMD64 chips, which met the 3.2C quite well (pretty balanced in comparisons of 3000+ vs. 3.0C, etc), and which quickly ramped beyond the Prescotts abilities to ramp up speed. Then came Cedar Mill, which actually was quite decent, but too little, too late, and Intel was already focusing on Conroe's polishing.

It makes me wonder, had Prescott actually launched with Cedar Mill's characteristics, Intel might have further evolved the netburst era. Cedar Mill (and Presler) would have been fairly competitive to the 3000+ to 4000+ range of AMD64 processors. We're pretty lucky in retrospect that Prescott jumped the shark though, Conroe was the basis for the most butt-kicking series of CPU releases in history, and when you consider inflation, $ for $ we have it made compared to the old days. I remember paying $300 for a pretty pathetic 3800+ X2, and almost $200 for 2GB of DDR2 to go with it. Amazing what $500 will buy you in a chip+ram today.

[bigboxes]

I love reading these threads! I miss my old Abit KT7A-RAID mobo. It housed quite a few of those CPUs that y'all have reminisced about. My 2600+ Barton was the last Socket A cpu that I owend. I ran that quite a while and became my file server when I upgraded to the A64 3200+. I retired it when my KX7-333RAID mobo caps failed.

KT7A-RAID:
1200Mhz Thunderbird (upgrade from Pentium 200MMX-- woo hoo!)
1600+ Palomino (unlocked with pencil trick; 1.4Ghz to 1.8Ghz)

KX7-333RAID: (upgraded to use DDR memory)
1800+ Thoroughbred
2400+ Thoroughbred
2600+ Barton

I have lying around an Abit VA-20 board just to play around with my old Socket A processors from time to time. Yeah, I'm on Intel now. I still miss my Socket A CPUs though.

[PliotronX]

Yeah these threads are certifiable. Thems were the days when I spent much time tracking down Winbond BH-5 DIMMs.

[2is]

Originally Posted by PliotronX

Yeah these threads are certifiable. Thems were the days when I spent much time tracking down Winbond BH-5 DIMMs.

It's all about the 2-2-2 timings!

[deltree86]

Barton days were good but nothing beats the price performance that 754 and 939 offered right before c2d came in!

[Arkaign]

Originally Posted by deltree86

Barton days were good but nothing beats the price performance that 754 and 939 offered right before c2d came in!

What?

Performance was good, but those were crazy expensive. Top models were $1k, cheapest X2s were $300.

[NTMBK]

Originally Posted by Arkaign

What?

Performance was good, but those were crazy expensive. Top models were $1k, cheapest X2s were $300.

Exactly, the Price/Performance ratio was as high as it's ever been!

[Piroko]

But you were also able to get singlecore A64s for dirt cheap. And they were great performers compared to the late P4s.

[Gikaseixas]

AMD was fast and cheap, i had a Duron 1.0 ghz (which felt snapier than my Pentium 4 1.8ghz), XP 1900+, XP 2500+, XP 3000+ and XP 3200.

[Soulkeeper]

Originally Posted by 2is

It's all about the 2-2-2 timings!

Yeah, back when a good set of mem put you back $300+
That was my set of BH-5's

[BeauCharles]

The resurrection is complete (both of this thread and my old 2500+ Barton)! Reassembled it with a few other parts shifted around (have a box full of old stuff):

Athlon XP 2500+ (OC to a 3200+)
2GB PC3200 RAM
X850 XT (actually an X850 Pro flashed to an XT) with an AC ATI Silencer 5
MSI K7N2 Delta2 LSR
PC Power and Cooling 750W (total overkill, but it was just sitting around)
Windows XP

The pièce de résistance - an OCZ Vertex Plus SSD. Just took a few tweaks in the RAID menu to make it boot Windows on the decrepit old motherboard. It was the only thing I had to buy - Newegg has 60GB refurbished ones for cheap.

I've been playing Torchlight on it and using it for the internet. Plays the old games fine, but browsing feels a little "sticky" waiting for the old XP to load the busy, more graphically intense modern websites. It was a waste of time and $50, but sometimes I like to do things like this just for the hell of it - its fun.

[smitbret]

Originally Posted by dpodblood

2500+ was boss. Especially the mobile variant that could fit into a desktop socket. Overclocked like a champ, and blew everything Intel had out of the water in both price and performance.

I installed and overclocked about a dozen of these. Probably my single favorite CPU ever. Last CPU before multi-core took over. I still have my first in its original box sitting in the garage cuz I'm too emotionally attached to throw it out.

[86waterpumper]

I have a buddy who has one of these systems running in his daughter's room. It pretty much streams netflix most of the time. I was surprised when i was over there the other day to see a old single core do this at 25-30 percent of cpu power. Still some life left in these!

[Plimogz]

Originally Posted by BeauCharles

The resurrection is complete (both of this thread and my old 2500+ Barton)! Reassembled it with a few other parts shifted around (have a box full of old stuff):

Athlon XP 2500+ (OC to a 3200+)
2GB PC3200 RAM
X850 XT (actually an X850 Pro flashed to an XT) with an AC ATI Silencer 5
MSI K7N2 Delta2 LSR<------
PC Power and Cooling 750W (total overkill, but it was just sitting around)
Windows XP

The pièce de résistance - an OCZ Vertex Plus SSD. Just took a few tweaks in the RAID menu to make it boot Windows on the decrepit old motherboard. It was the only thing I had to buy - Newegg has 60GB refurbished ones for cheap.

I've been playing Torchlight on it and using it for the internet. Plays the old games fine, but browsing feels a little "sticky" waiting for the old XP to load the busy, more graphically intense modern websites. It was a waste of time and $50, but sometimes I like to do things like this just for the hell of it - its fun.

Urgh, K7N2 Delta2 LSR... I remember seeing a few of these come back in systems after a couple of years with failing caps and wonky issues. And while I wouldn't single them out particularly, I wish you luck with yours after all this time.

[hoorah]

Originally Posted by Arkaign

And god forbid you have an AXP and be stuck with a crappy VIA chipset. Ugh.

Stares down at feet ashamedly.....

[hoorah]

Originally Posted by 86waterpumper

I have a buddy who has one of these systems running in his daughter's room. It pretty much streams netflix most of the time. I was surprised when i was over there the other day to see a old single core do this at 25-30 percent of cpu power. Still some life left in these!

I just sold an entire XP 3000+ system the other day to a guy on craigslist for $40. The thing had trouble streaming youtube at anything over 80% cpu usage, but it also had a pretty low end graphics card with no GPU acceleration.

[Unoid]

Miss my 2400 Mobile running at 250Mhz FSB at 2.5ghz with BH-5

Great box.

[BeauCharles]

Originally Posted by Plimogz

Urgh, K7N2 Delta2 LSR... I remember seeing a few of these come back in systems after a couple of years with failing caps and wonky issues. And while I wouldn't single them out particularly, I wish you luck with yours after all this time.

Meh - no big loss if it does.

[ggeros]

I didn't have a Barton on release. I upgraded a Morgan Duron system to a Barton (axp 2500+) on my LAN party box right before I upgraded my desktop from a TBird @ 1.4 on a KT266A to an A64 on an NForce3. It got the old Radeon 8500. So somewhere after 2004. The last Videocard I ran in it was a Radeon 9800pro handmedown around 2006.

The Barton ran on a really cheap KT400 board made by Biostar, but it had the singular advantage of being the only motherboard with an AGP slot that would fit in the old microscope case I used to build it in. And since the CPU ran native at 166FSB speeds it overclocked pretty well, even on a cheap mobo that didn't really support 200FSB. I think it made 1.8 or 2GHz.


I do miss that little box it was fun to build and show off.

[Avalon]

I miss Epox

My 8RDA3+ overclocked so many mobile bartons it was crazy.