Dual Celeron vs. Duron

[joohang]

I currently have ABit BP6 with 2x Celeron 433 w/256MB PC100 RAM

I want to upgrade my motherboard and CPU, so I was considering to upgrade to a Duron 750 or a Thunderbird 800.

Will the performance increase significant? I mean.. shall I bother spending money to get a Duron 750?

I ran some SiSoft Sandra benchmarks and the numbers look pretty good, except for the memory bus (which is quite obvious). However, I don't trust these benchmark numbers a whole lot because my computer seems a lot slower than my friend's Athlon 700.

FYI, my computer specs are:
ABit BP6
2x 128MB PC100 RAM
2x Celeron 433
Maxtor 20GB 7200rpm

I use my computer mostly to run Windows 2000 server for development purposes. So I use Office 2000, Visual Studio 6.0 and some graphics software.

I'll welcome any responses.

Thanks.

 

[todays]

I sold my Abit BP6 with dual Celeron 366 @550Mhz. My Abit KT7 T-Bird 750 @980Mhz walks all over the PB6.

 

[IaPuP]

Both the Duron and Athlon at 750 will tear-up your current setup in almost all apps.

Only some very specialized, SMP-friendly programs will run faster on your dual setup (RC5 is very SMP-friendly).

The Celerons are limited by their FSB, especially in dual operation and most programs aren't multithreaded anyway. Realistically, you won't be getting more than about 25% faster than a single Celeron 433.

Eric

 

[abracadabra1]

do for the duron rig if you really need power now, but wait a few months if it can wait.
ddr sdram/mobos should give you a nice little boost for little to no increase in cost.

 

[joohang]

Thanks a lot for your responses.

I think I'll upgrade to a Duron some time soon, since I got a pair of PC100 SDRAM that would be wasted if I wait and upgrade to DDR.

I don't want to invest much on this upgrade, so I was thinking about getting a Duron 750 with Gigabyte microATX board. That way I'll be able to use my 250W power supply (and hopefully it'll work fine).

What do you think?

Is this fine? Or should I just save up a couple of hundreds bucks more and get an Asus or ABit board and a 300W power supply instead?

 

[Jugernot]

abracadabra1, you'll have to buy new ram.

 

[paulip88]

Joohang,

If you really want to go for value, you would need to get either the Asus A7V or Abit KT7 since these allow you to OC. A Duron really isn't running anywhere near its capabilities unless you OC it.

Costwise, this would mean that you would need to upgrade the PSU and spend a bit more on a mobo. You should still be able to use your RAM though, although AMD boards are known to be picky about RAM.

I think when you upgrade, you have to consider that for about $80-$100 more, you can improve performance by about 25-50%. Also, the upgraded PSU will still be around when you do your next system upgrade.

 

[Abednigo]

Good lord - stay away from Micro anything in your mobo!! bleck. There's nothing more frustrating than trying to cram everything into a tiny board, or worse, not having all the slots when you want to upgrade. I have the MSI K7T, first version, and although I haven't tried any overclocking it runs very stable under win 98, and under winME.

 

[joohang]

Thanks.

About overclocking... I never had the guts to try it on my system, although I have a pretty good idea on how to do it.

Say if I get Duron 600 and OC to 900. Wouldn't this affect the stability of my system?

I personally would just spend the extra bucks on a Thunderbird 900 if I really needed the extra power, since stability is more of an issue than "free" extra MHz.

And, I'll stay away from microATX.

 

[Vpham97]

This info was straight off an ad.
I Don't remember the exact setting for the Intel stuff.

An Athlon 700 will outperform a dual pentium 500 server setup.
And this is w/out overclocking.

 

[paulip88]

Joohang,

If you do not plan to OC, I would go with the MSI K7T Pro. Its a solid, stable board. It is also not as picky about memory as some of the other AMD boards.