Budget CPU upgrade?

[nullibist]

Hi, i'm thinking of upgrading from my PIII 733 without spending too much, so what sort of performance increase would a Duron 1.3G offer over the PIII? Wouldnt the lower L2 cache on the Duron (64, compared to 256 ATC) diminish the comparison somewhat, even though the raw mhz is nearly double... any comments? Oh and i'll be keeping my 384 sdram for the time being too, rather than ddr. Thx for any input...

nullibist

 

[adlep]

Hmm,
You would notice a diffrience, Duron has a newer architecture (Morgan core) + quite strong FPU unit, I would say, the gain in performance would be about 30%......
If you want to keep the sdr, then I would suggest you to get ECS K7S5A mobo. Many people complains about it, but I never had any problems with it, and I ve build about 12 systems based on that board... It has 2 sdr and 2 ddr slots, so it will be possible for you to pick up the ddr stick later.... And it supports virtually all socket A processors, so you in a future should not have any problems upgrading the CPU even further...
Another thing... this place has 256 Mb of Crucial DDR for below $40.00 shipped(the first one from the top, they call it just micron memory, but it is a real, crucial RAM, I know because I bought like 30 sticks...). My advice is to upgrade the memory as well right now because it will not stay that cheap for ever.....
2 months ago this same stick of Crucial RAM would cost you about $90.00, so the current price is cheap.....

Edit: If you would decide to get the DDR memory, the diffrience in a performance should be even greather

Good luck

 

[adlep]

Oh, welcome to anandtech forums... and
you should be able to sell you PIII proc+ board combo for minimum $60.00, make it extra $25.00 for the memory...and you can get yourself more than enough DDR memory for that kind of money....

 

[nullibist]

Thanks for the welcome. Re vendors and prices you mentioned, i live in Sydney, Australia, so i have to double the number to convert to Aust. $, but yes, i plan on selling the m/b and ram for about $200 Aust/$100USD to defray the cost of the new m/b and cpu. I think Asus have a board that has both DDR and SDR slots too. The ECS seems incredibly rare in Aust., i havent seen a single one yet. BTW i spend most of my time on the overclockers.com.au site (which is a damn great site!!) but i thought i might widen my sphere of information by dropping in over here

nullibist

Originally posted by: adlep
Oh, welcome to anandtech forums... and
you should be able to sell you PIII proc+ board combo for minimum $60.00, make it extra $25.00 for the memory...and you can get yourself more than enough DDR memory for that kind of money....

 

[techwanabe]

Originally posted by: nullibist
Hi, i'm thinking of upgrading from my PIII 733 without spending too much, so what sort of performance increase would a Duron 1.3G offer over the PIII? Wouldnt the lower L2 cache on the Duron (64, compared to 256 ATC) diminish the comparison somewhat, even though the raw mhz is nearly double... any comments? Oh and i'll be keeping my 384 sdram for the time being too, rather than ddr. Thx for any input...
nullibist

What you are interested in doing is what I am doing. As in keeping my sdr memory and case/PS. Here is what I got for $131 US: A Celeron-T 1.0A and ABIT ST6 mobo. That is the shipped price. My current system is a Cumine PIII running at 733 mhz so I will be planning to OC the new CPU to 1.4 mhz give or take thus doubling my CPU speed. The Celeron-T actually performs as good or better than the PIII. Anyway, that is another option to consider if you are staying cheap and reusing your sdr memory like I am.

 

[oldfart]

techwanabe, are you ever going to actually put that thing together??

 

[JeremiahTheGreat]

Yay, another aussie hits the boards!!


The K7S5A can be bought for $145AUD .. not sure about Duron prices. K7S5A is quite a good board (points at rig), even if i did have to do a little mod to it, its excellent for its price! The fact that you can use your SDRam with it and upgrade to DDR ram (as soon as those memory prices start dropping in australia - probably be around 6months later than everyone else ) when u have the cash!

 

[nullibist]

Originally posted by: JeremiahTheGreat
Yay, another aussie hits the boards!!

The K7S5A can be bought for $145AUD .. not sure about Duron prices. K7S5A is quite a good board (points at rig), even if i did have to do a little mod to it, its excellent for its price! The fact that you can use your SDRam with it and upgrade to DDR ram (as soon as those memory prices start dropping in australia - probably be around 6months later than everyone else ) when u have the cash!

I can get that board for $130 and the Duron for $120, not bad, still, i'm a bit wary of a non-bigname m/board, I like Asus (very fond of my CUSL2-c), hmmmm, /scratches head, also for not much more than the Duron i can get a decent Athlon XP, i hate making these decisions, i'll probably put it off for a while, thats always a good solution.

 

[nullibist]

OK, now i'm thinking the Asus A7A266 might be better than the ECS board:

1. It assuages my fears of a 'non-name' board.
2. It supports 3 x SDR (as well as 2 x DDR) ... handy since i have 3 x 128MB PC133 atm. 3.
3. It supports ATA133 onboard, and i have an ATA133 Maxtor Viper HDD (not that ata133 makes too much diff. tho.)

$20US more exp., but maybe worth it. Any comments?

 

[mechBgon]

Add "3-year warranty" to the list of Asus plusses

Having said that, I like my K7S5A too. For what it cost me, it has been a very nice upgrade.

 

[nullibist]

Well i just ordered the ECS board and Athlon XP 1600. Might not be a "name" board but after reading alot of reviews online it crept ahead of the A7A266 in my estimation Thx for the input

 

[techwanabe]

Originally posted by: oldfart
techwanabe, are you ever going to actually put that thing together??

LOL Oldfart! I've been wondering when you were going to give me a jab and a poke! *heh heh* Let's see, I've had that Abit motherboard for about 3 weeks now...

I am the master procrastinator no doubt. And to top it off I may be out of town on a trip for 9 days too. But something has happened which will force the issue. It's a thing called Never Winter Nights and while my current system has been running spritely enough for my current needs, thus allowing me to sit comforably and put things off, NWN will probably need more horse power to run gracefully. Its' recommended minimum is a GF2 video card and 800 mhz CPU.

Please, you keep me accountable!