How stable are T-bred "A's"

[AluminumStudios]

I currently have an Epox 8K3A+ (KT333) with an Athlon XP2000 (AGOIA stepping that I can OC to 1766 MHz with my Volcano 7 HSF)

I've been very pleased with the stability and performance of my system, but I need every ounce of speed that I can get for video editing with Adobe AfterEffects and Premiere. I was considering building a duplicate of my system for my mom and giving her my XP2000 and buying a 2200 for myself for just a little extra speed.

My question is how stable are the T-bred A's? Since the A's maxed out around 1.8 GHz for the most part, I'm concered that a chip so near it's tolerances may not be as stable or tolerant as a chip that has a little more headroom. One of my concerns is that during the summer my apartment gets really hot during the day when I'm away ... and I need to leave my computer rendering/compressing video and I can't really leave the A/C on when I'm away. During the summer my XP2000 liked to hit 66 degrees (Celcius) and I couldn't OC it past 1700 MHz or so without loosing stability. (not that the weather is cooler the cpu idles at 50 deg. and hits 60 when I have AfterEffects churning away.)

My other option is building myself a P4 2.0a with an Epox 4PEA+ motherboard. However all benchmarks I've read seem to indicate that unless I can OC it past 2.2 it will probably be a tad slower than my Athlon for a lot of the CPU intensive things I do.

 

[Bovinicus]

The Thoroughbred As are plenty stable at their normal clockspeeds. However, they offer little to no overclocking headroom. I would suggest getting a 2400+ or higher. Those CPUs are based on the Thoroughbred B core. That core has a lot more overclocking headroom. 2.2-2.4GHz seems to be about the average overclock you can hope to get out of it with air cooling. 2.2GHz is roughly the clockspeed of a 2800+. Some 2700+s have shown up at various vendors now. I believe they are the first CPUs to have the 333MHz FSB. So, there are a few ways you could go. Of course, if you don't have DDR333 memory, the 2700+ isn't really worth it.

If you want to go the Intel route, you will be able to overclock that 2.0A to about 2.5GHz-2.8GHz most likely. Just make sure you get a motherboard that supports AGP/PCI lock.

Eiher route you take, you should be able to acheive about the same level of performance after overclocking. Sticking with the XP is probably the better way to go just because you already have the motherboard for it.