Is it worthwhile to upgrade an Athlon XP 3200?

[rddyck]

I purchased an Athlon XP Barton 2500 for about $90 around 3 years ago and have it overclocked to the equivalent of an Athlon XP 3200 (2.2GHZ core). It is running on an nforce2 ASUS mobo with 1.5GB's RAM and a GeForce 6800 GT video card.

I used to upgrade about every 18 months - 2 years. But, now 3 years later and I can buy an Athlon 3800 X2 for $300. Does dual core run twice as fast? No. Is the core significantly fatser? No, heck its slower (2.0 GHZ)

Is there something I am overlooking? It seems like it would cost me about $500 for a new CPU and mobo (and I may need a new vid card to boot) for what, 30% performance boost?

I suppose I need to give up on the idea of upgrading to a new cpu that is 50% - 100% faster every 18 months for around $200.

Now if it only didn't look like Windows Vista will be a major resource hog that will make my computer feel like it is 10 years older than it really is with no appreciably viable upgrade path. Sigh...

Comments welcome, thanks.

 

[Fern]

My rig is pretty much similar to yours (see sig). I don't need a dual core chip, so like you i'm holding off on upgrading. I would like to upgrade the gfx card, but there's really nothing available in AGP.

I may wrong here, but I thought Windows Vista was a 64 bit OS, so it won't run on our rigs anyway.

Fern

 

[SynthDude2001]

Originally posted by: Fern
My rig is pretty much similar to yours (see sig). I don't need a dual core chip, so like you i'm holding off on upgrading. I would like to upgrade the gfx card, but there's really nothing available in AGP.

I may wrong here, but I thought Windows Vista was a 64 bit OS, so it won't run on our rigs anyway.

Fern

You are wrong. (There will be both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows Vista, they wouldn't alienate so much of their potential market...hell, most people who have 64-bit CPU's, including myself, still run 32-bit operating systems because 64-bit driver support is poor at best...)

As for the OP, you have to realize that a 2.0GHz Athlon 64/Opteron is going to be faster than a 2.2GHz Athlon XP, sometimes quite a bit faster (especially if you overclock - no one really runs these CPU's at stock ). But yes, at the same time, if you're just looking at games, dual core won't do much for you right now. That might change in the coming months with Unreal Engine 3 (and other) games coming to market, but as it stands now, it doesn't buy you much more for games (except for a few special cases like Quake 4). If you do other CPU-intensive work or multitasking, or would like to (like video encoding), you'll get a huge boost.

Being on an AGP video card limits you somewhat too - I have a 6800GT myself and I went with the ASRock motherboard (AGP+PCI-E) so I wouldn't have to immediately trash the video card. I did see a boost in some games relative to my old overclocked Athlon XP, but now I have a rather more obvious GPU limitation in pretty much all games from 2004 and later.

Since you're going to be looking at a major upgrade anyway, you might want to wait for Conroe (from Intel) this summer...it looks to be a nice boost over dual core AMD chips. You will need a new video card and RAM (DDR2) though. Alternately, for a cheaper upgrade you could do what I did...keep your video card until you can afford to replace it, get the ASRock motherboard, use your current DDR400 RAM, and get a Socket 939 CPU...

I guess it all really just depends on what you do with your computer right now that you're not satisfied with in speed.

 

[BassBomb]

i went from 1.8ghz barton to 2.0ghz amd64 and it kilsl my barton

 

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

Athlon64 / Sempron pw3ns Barton.

 

[A554SS1N]

lol... Any Athlon 64 in games is miles better than an old Socket A chip, as for dual-core, that'll get more and more useful in the next couple of years in games, so maybe just holding out for a few months when AM2 prices have stabilized and pick out something new then. Socket A is soooo old tech....

 

[Stumps]

I was in the same boat as you are, I decided to bite the bullet and upgrade my 3000+@2.33ghz and GA-7N400 PRO to an AMD64 3000+ (Venice)SKT 754 and a GA-K8NS PRO...at stock speeds the AMD64 was marginally faster but as soon as I overclocked it to 2.4ghz, it leaves my old 3000+ barton for dead, DOOM 3 and HL2 gained nearly 30FPS over the Barton, D3 went from 68FPS@1024x768 high quality to 98FPS at the same settings and is much smoother when the action heats up a bit.

If you are going to go to SKT 939 you will probably see an even bigger jump in performance due to the dual channel memory interface.

my specs now are as follows

AMD64 3000+@2.4GHz
GA-K8NS PRO (SKT754)
1GB DDR400 (2x 512mb)
ASUS V9999GT 6800GT 128MB

 

[RussianSensation]

I am a similar position. I have P4 2.6@3.2ghz and 1 gig of ram. I am not going to upgrade to a dying S939 when Conroe (that is cheaper and better performing than AM2) is just around the corner.

Plus Vista might be delayed until March of 2007. So if you dont find the need to upgrade for games or for general use, then save your $ for something else for now.