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Athlon XP and KT133A, any drop in performance?

R

Rainsford

Lifer
I have a quick question for anyone that bought a new Athlon XP and didn't go with a new DDR board, how does it work? I have an Iwill KK266 with a Thunderbird 800 at 933. But it's getting a little slow (relativly speaking of course), and I was thinking about getting a new processor. The Athlon XP sounds good, but I don't really want to spring for a new motherboard and RAM since what I have is working just fine. How much of a performance hit will I take if I don't get DDR memory? Is there any reason I should spend the extra money and get a DDR board and DDR memory? I know the benchmarks show some performance increase, but I was wondering what people that actually had that combination thought. Thanks.
 
There's about a 25% performance increase between the KT133A and the KT266A. I have an Asus A7V133 with a 1GHz AMD Thunderbird AXIA @ 1.4GHz and it's hardly slow. When I got my tax returns I was about to get a DDR motherboard and DDR RAM but the prices of RAM now do not justify an upgrade to me considering I have 512MB PC133 CL2 from Crucial. A 256MB PC2100 DIMM is just too much to pay for and would be a downgrade for me.
 
You will see a dramatic improvement if your memory bandwith intensive programs. If you run things like 3D Studio Max, you will hardly notice an increase in performance.
 
I am in the same boat as you jonmcc33. I have the A7V133 with 512 megs of ram and didn't upgrade to a new board because of the high price of RAM.

It really is application dependent as to what the performance increase would be between SDRAM and DDR RAM. If you run memory dependent apps then DDR RAM will help but if you run a lot of integer/floating point intensive apps, then the memory bandwidth of course wouldn't be as important.

From a Thrunderbird 933, you will see a substantial performance increase upgrading to one of the faster Palominos even without DDR RAM. If RAM were were as cheap as it was a few months ago, I might recommend a MB and RAM upgrade; but now it makes more sense for you just to upgrade to a faster processor.
 
I'd go with the processor upgrade and sit tight for a while. The KK266 is a nice mobo...you won't be giving up that much performance.

Super6
 


<< I'd go with the processor upgrade and sit tight for a while. The KK266 is a nice mobo...you won't be giving up that much performance. >>



Agreed keep the board for now & put that faster cpu in there,before when I had my K7S5A board I was using Sdram & then switched to DDR and I didnt see much difference.

Only benchmarks will show you a difference,in everyday use I dont think it's worth it for you to ditch your ram & board for a few % in benchmarks.😉
 
Thanks for all the replies. I think I'll probably go with just a new processor without the DDR. I suppose I can always buy a new board and RAM later. Maybe DDR prices will come down /me crosses fingers
 
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