Barton 3200+ to Athlon 3000+ 939 socket

[crowdx]

Well i am currently running a Barton 2500+ clocked at 2.2ghz (FSB 200mhz x 11) and I am thinking of moving to an Athlon 64. Will I see much of an improvement over the current cpu I am using? I am running on an Epox 8RDA3+ and 1 gig of OCZ 3200 memory.

I am thinking of a 3000+ Athlon 64 and clocking it (hopefully) to at least 3400+ speeds.
What motherboard is worth getting for this cpu? I have had great luck with Epox BUT seems their 939 boards are not available at NewEgg as yet.

My main use for my machine is Photoshop and web design. I play games such as Far Cry and Sims 2 using a 9800 Pro.

My main gripe with my present setup is sometimes accessing folders with a large amount of files in them can take a while to open, machine acts like it is locked up when trying to open the folder, I think this seems like a cpu issue (about 30,000 files in a folder). Also a weird issue I also have is when Outlook 2003 is collecting email it utilizes 100% cpu and so kills anything else I am doing.

Will a cpu move from barton to 64 plus the new board make any difference ?(tangible and not just benchmarks)

TIA
Patrick

 

[wseyller]

You would definetely get a boost in speed with an Athlon64. What hard drive do you have? That might play an important factor in many cases as far as speed goes with some of the type of things you may be using this rig for.

 

[crowdx]

I have 2 160gig Western Digitals 8mb cache 7200rpm and one 80 gig Western Digital 8mb cache 7200rpm. All less than a year old.
Patrick

 

[Ronnie]

I switched to an athlon64 close to a year ago from a barton @ 2.2 the difference was noticable in gaming. Have you considered running a raid-0 setup with your current setup.

 

[crowdx]

Have many times considered a RAID o setup ,, have always just been too nervous of losing the raid and all the data, the way I look at my current setup is that if a drive crashes or fails then I lose some data whereas with RAID 0 I could lose all my data.. make sense?

Patrick

 

[Disorganise]

30,000 files in one folder is a lot. I don't think explorer has ever been particularly great with such big numbers.
If right clicking a file is also abit slow, it could be that you have registry entries assigning file extensions to apps which no longer exist. Run regclean (if you can still find it for download - MS pulled it last time I looked) against it - it might help.

Ultimately though, your best best is to reduce the number of files per folder.

you might also want to try starting with a fresh profile (ie, create a new user and log in with that) - the differene can be huge! that might 'fix' your outlook problem too although you'll need to set it up again first.

 

[crowdx]

Yes, I am thinking about chronologically ordering that folder

I have this setup from a ghost image, is all the apps I use and drivers etc installed. I refresh the OS drive every month or so.
Patrick

 

[Gamingphreek]

You will see a HUGE improvement when going A64 unless the XP is clocked around 2.6 where the difference is much less noticable in general aspects.

-Kevin

 

[crowdx]

My Barton is clocked at 2.2ghz with 200fsb.
I am hoping that I get a similar performance boost as when I went from an Athlon 1600 xp to the Barton clocked at it's 1700mhz rating.
Patrick

 

[Porter21]

I agree with the fact that you will probably see an improvement in gaming. As far as in general, I'm not sure. Just wait until they come out with more 64-bit apps and it should run really well.