Cheap upgrade for an athlon xp system

[episodic]

Hi looking to swap out an athlon xp 3000 with

# BIOSTAR GEFORCE 6100-M9 939 NVIDIA GeForce 6100 Micro ATX AMD Motherboard -
# AMD Athlon 64 3500+ Manchester 2.2GHz Socket 939 Processor Model ADA3500DKA4CG - OEM

With a cooling fan, I can get both of these for 90 bucks.


Question 1 - will there be a large difference in speed with this upgrade? I don't want to do it if video encoding won't be affected largely.

Question 2 - I've been using the same 2 sticks of ddr 333 ram for a long time. Do they wear out? Should I consider getting new sticks? I'm 'really' going on the cheap here - so if it is all good, I'll stick with my 2x512. The board supports ddr 400 - but to me the slight increase insn't worth it if my existing ram will be fine.

Is this a worthy sub 100 dollar upgrade?

 

[bryanW1995]

no.

using the ultra-budget scenario, you can spend a few $$ extra for an x2 3800+. td has the x2 3800+ for 59.99 + shipping or 67.99 with hsf + shipping. spend the extra $25-$30 to get one of those and you'll have a dual-core system that will last you a little while. here's the link to the oem one: http://www.tigerdirect.com/app...ails.asp?EdpNo=3001041

 

[myocardia]

What Brian forgot to tell you is that even though the X2 3800 is 200 Mhz slower than the 3500, it's almost twice as fast at video encoding, since it's dual-core.

 

[NoSoup4You]

Dual-core is more than worth the couple extra $.

 

[Amaroque]

Do you OC at all? I have an X2 3800 @ 2.4 GHz in one of my systems. You could down clock the RAM while OCing the CPU's.

BTW: Bryan, and the subsequent posts are correct. If you're going that route, absolutely go with the dual core.

 

[zach0624]

Since it seems like you want to keep your ram 939 looks good but socket am2 is very cheap right now, and 1gb of ddr2 667 is around $30 and a mobo combo for about $100 dollars and an upgrade to phenom if you want down the road.

 

[ShawnD1]

Originally posted by: Amaroque
Do you OC at all? I have an X2 3800 @ 2.4 GHz in one of my systems. You could down clock the RAM while OCing the CPU's.

How is that even possible? Don't AMD and Intel lock the multipliers on their processors?

Right now I'm using the Asus 30% profile on a Core 2, and it boosted the FSB from 267MHz to 346MHz. I assume it would have increased the multiplier if it was not locked.

 

[Nickel020]

AMD boards don't limit your RAM to > FSB. So your RAM can be clocked lower than your FSB.

And episodic, those old Athlon XPs are worth quite a bit on ebay, at least here in Europe. Athlon XP 3200+ with a hsf usually go for 80+?, you'll proably get 60+$ for your CPU.

 

[episodic]

I guess it is all moot. I ended up snagging a dell refurb which is an x2 3800, 1 gig of ram, 160gb sata, and a burner for 249$