Best 'value' CPU

[thelawnet]

Hi, I am a building a new system from the following components:

Seagate 160GB hard drive (8mb cache)
NEC 3520A Dvd burner
Antec Sonata case

I want to team motherboard, 512MB RAM and a cheap CPU with this in order to make a machine that will be used pretty lightly - web browsing, file serving to my xbox, occasional DVD burning, and maybe a little Visual Studio.

I always looked at the Athlon XP chips, however, since the introduction of the Sempron range, it appears that they are very difficult to obtain, and furthermore, the pricing seems to have moved up slightly, I guess as AMD are trying to sell their Athlon 64s.

So it looks like I will probably get a Sempron I haven't really found any good discussion of the complete range of Sempron chips anywhere, especially the bottom-end ones, but in general I find it quite confusing working out whether a particular sempron is better than a given Athlon XP.

Anyway, I have found the following 333MHz fsb/256KB cache chips:

Sempron 2200+ (1.5GHz) £34 - retail
Sempron 2300+ (1.583GHz) £35 - retail
Sempron 2400+ (1.667GHz) £41 - retail
Sempron 2500+ (1.75 GHz) £42 - OEM, £49 retail
Sempron 2600+ (1.83 GHz) £47 - OEM, £55 retail
Sempron 2800+ (2 GHz) £58 - OEM

and then
Athlon XP 2200+ (tbred, 266MHz fsb, 256Kb cache) OEM £50
Athlon XP 2600+ (barton, 333MHz fsb, 2.08GHz) OEM £59

Anyway, my understanding is that the thoroughbred is a pretty poor chip with little room for overclocking, whereas the Semprons are all Barton-based, and should overclock nicely, so that XP 2200+ is a pretty bad deal? If so, is there any sense in spending any more money on Sempron, or are they all the same chip with equal overclocking potential (I'm not too sure about multipliers and things like that). ANd is the retail cooling solution worth anything, or am I better with an OEM chip, and buying my own cooler + thermal paste?

And can anyone recommend a best buy out of these? Ideally I would look to spend the least amount, so the XP 2600+ and Sempron 2800+ are a little pricey for me.

And finally, should I just get generic PC2700 memory to go with this (maybe for overclocking get generic PC3200?), or can anyone justify spending a bit more, bearing in mind a total budget of about £120 for mboard + CPU + RAM. Oh, and one last thing, please recommend a good value motherboard, with onboard graphics that would support overclocking (basically the cheapest thing that's reliable (no pcchips), has onboard graphics and will let me overclock).

 

[Netopia]

Even though it's a bit more expensive, you should look at an Athlon XP-M / nForce2 mobo combination. The XP-M (because of GREAT overclockability on the nForce2) will blow away every single one of the chips you have listed. I have yet to have one (or have any friends that have ones) that won't do 2.2 GHz like a walk in the park and even that is at lower than normal voltage and cooler than normal temps. MANY people report 2.4-2.5GHz with no problem. There's at least on thread on this forum about the XP-M 2500+'s where you can garner more info.

Add to that the fact that if you grab 2 sticks of memory, you can use them in dual channel mode on the nForce2 for better performance too.

I don't know that it's worth it to say a little money to not go with this combo. It gives you more power, more options and more useable life.

Joe

 

[thelawnet]

thanks for that netopia... Is there any difference between the 2400+ mobile and 2500+ mobile. I can get the 2400+ for about the same price as the non-mobile 2600+?

 

[Netopia]

Buy the cheapest XP-M you can find. They all overclock about the same, so just buy whatever is cheapest. Also, they are all unlocked.

 

[Deanodarlo]

It is worth spending a little more than £120 and do what Netopia advises. I did quite a lot of research and decided mobile Bartons are a steal at the moment (cheaper than slower Semprons) and will save you about £100 in comparision to buying Athlon64 components.

When you buy an XP-M however (should get one for about £50), be sure to get a motherboard with a 5-bit FSD so you can use all multiplier adjustments. If you don't, you'll only be able to use multipliers up to 13.5.

I strongly recommend the Abit NF7-S v2.0 (excellent onboard soundstorm sound and raid) or the cheaper NF7 v2.0 (no raid or soundstorm). You can buy one for around £50 and they're awesome boards using the Ultra400 chipset for 200FSB. Even better is the fact that if you flash to the latest bios (which can be done from windows via an internet update), it recognises the XP-M as an "Athlon XP" rather than listing "unknown CPU".

Be careful NOT to buy the NF7-SG or NF7-SG2 (think that's what they are called). These were released after the NF7 v2.0 and use cheaper components, no 5bit FID and poorer quality.

Not sure about the A7N - think it's a slight upgrade of the NF7 v2.0 with mGuru thingy but more expensive.

That'll cost about £120 inc VAT and delivery. The extra cash will be required for the RAM. I got a dual pack of PC3200 256MB CAS 2.5 Geil for about £50, but it's not necessary to run Dual channel. Performance increase is very small. I bought them mainly because they can be re-use in an A64 board in the future.

 

[christopherzombie]

I used two 2400+ Semprons w/ a Chiantech KT600 and an Asus A7N8X in my kid's computers. Both CPUs overclocked to 2.01ghz out of the box with stock cooling and vCore. Not bad for $50. The third kid has a 2500+ Barton on another Chaintech KT600 @ 2.2ghz. I spent about $500 on each computer - complete with all coponents; eg: OS, case, speakers, VGA... All from newegg.

But if I were going to build another budget computer for myself, I'd use the 2600+ Barton, an Asus or Abit NF2 mobo and a 9800pro or eVGA 5900SE.

 

[TheStu]

go for the NF7 and the XP-M it is an excellent combination...

 

[miketheidiot]

Originally posted by: TheStu
go for the NF7 and the XP-M it is an excellent combination...

 

[HannibalTheCannibal]

yeah I have a xp-m 2600 im about 2.7 ghz right now, cpu at 43C. 230x12. With an nf7s. I am gonna ebay this mobo combo with gfx card after rest of my hardware gets here. Its the most stable thing I have been on. I hope my NEO4 is this reliable.
PS My current gfx card is a PNY FX5700Ultra (560/1.02ghz) 128MB 8X AGP I get 19,500 in 3dmark01, 4800 in 3dmark03, and *cough* 900 in 3dmark05 *cough*