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Barton 2500+ upgrade to Intel 2.6 C (gonna overclock)

C

crowdx

Member
Wondering if anyone has done a similar upgrade, I currently have my 2500+ running as a 3000+ with 1 gig memory at 197mhz. I often get desktop lags when multitasking ( I run around 800mb of apps on average, Adobe apps and a newsreader normally). Would the upgrade to the P4 2.6 C with a view to clocking it to a 3.0 C be worth it? Will cost a little over $300, my system sometimes dies for a minute or so while it catches up, will the Hyperthreading and 800mhz bus help?
I have all Western Digital drives with 8mb cache , an 80 and 3 160gig drives. I have OCZ memory and will have delivery of some PC3500 OCZ also.
Anyone got an opinion on this upgrade?
Patrick
 
It just so happens I had been running an identical setup to yours and just upgraded to a 2.6C running @ 3.0. 🙂 I don't really notice much of a difference in day to day apps. I also run a newsreader and two monitors full of apps including mapping software, Opera (memory hog) winamp, irc, aim, sysmetrix, etc. My mem usage rarely goes above 700 megs. Usually it's around 500. Bootup is much faster on the P4 though.

I mainly upgraded because I want to encode/decode media faster. I encoded all of my cds to .ape (lossless music format) so I can listen to them without swapping cds, plus I retain 100% of the quality. The only problem is when I want to listen to them on something other than my computer. Decoding them to .wav w/winamp monopolizes the system so much, even with winamp on low priority, that my Barton was essentially useless for a few minutes. (I need to test this on my P4 when I get home). In addition, video encoding will be much faster on the P4. News (4 threads at once) was mostly hampered by my harddrive, a 120 gb maxtor w/8mb cache, not the CPU/MB. It wasn't completely slammed, but if I tried doing much more on it, the drive's access would slow to a crawl.

I'm selling my AMD setup to a friend of mine, so this upgrade only cost me $100, which I feel was worth it since the performance delta for things I do the most was relatively high. I do miss the Soundstorm audio of my NF7-S though... the onboard sound with the IS7 just plain sucks! Plan to buy a soundcard if you value good sound.
 
Well my main apps are Indesign CS and Photoshop CS, I would think I should see improved performance with these apps?
The Barton and Motherboard (Epox 8RDA+) will be going into another machine. From some threads here I would think the Hyperthreading might help with my system stalls? Also the 4 dimms in dual mode instead of 3 dimms and only really able to use 2 of them in dual mode unless I get a 1 gig chip and 2 512mb chips.
What you think guys, the Barton is a great cpu but I would think my bottleneck right now is in the memory and how badly memory is managed by Athlon systems compared to the P4 counterparts?
Patrick
 
There's nothing wrong with how the Athlon manages memory. That's a function of the OS, not the cpu/mb/memory subsystem. The Athlon platform has less memory bandwidth than the P4, if that's what you mean. The AXP used to have the upper hand in most Photoshop benchmarks due to its strong FPU, but a P4 with HT is faster.

BTW, the .ape to .wav in WinAmp goes very smoothly now... no system lag at all.
 
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