Just Upgraded to an Athlon X1900+ System

[Siddhartha]

I just upgraded to an AMD Athlon XP1900+\KT266A system and man is this thing fast!. I thought my old system, Thunderbird 1.33 gHz\Abit, was fast but the XP1900+ leaves it behind like a Porsche 911 Turbo going around an out of tune Honda Civic. It screams! And I have not tweaked the BIOS yet.

If anyone is considering a similar system all I can say is "GO FOR IT YOU WILL BE GLAD YOU DID!".

Randolph

 

[Rahminator]

Bah, it's not screaming fast until you OC it 🙂. My XP 1600 1.4 is at 1.55. I could turn OC it to 1.6, but I would need better cooling and I don't want to do that because my computer would be too loud. Anyway, I'm content with this speed.

 

[John]

I am not sure what you do with your system, but my 1.7GHz system doesn't seem any faster than my old 1.33GHz rig. If all you changed was the cpu/mb, I am not sure how it really "leaves the old one behind" as you claim.

 

[Xenon14]

"Screams" ?

Why? Because it shaves 2 seconds off your mp3 encoding. I mean, sure it's faster, but nothing noticeable, and definately nothing worth wasting your money on. I might be an extremist and upgrade when I actually "need" to, but don't you have better things to spend money on than on trivial performance increases?

 

[Siddhartha]

I understand your skepticism. I suspect the new system's KT266A chipset and going from PC133 ram to DDR has alot to do with the increase in speed.
I also upgraded the Cdrive from a three year old 27 gig, ATA 66, 5400 rpm hard drive to a 40 gig, ATA 100, 7200 rpm unit

Why did I spend the money?
About two weeks ago the old system started to misbehave. At first it would crash the news reader Agent while it was down loading a large number of large files. But it would recover after it had finished the download. Then it started to completely freeze, not respond to alt-clrt-del nor mouse input, while running Agent and required a hard reboot. Then it started to freeze when moving files from one hard drive to another or at seemingly random situations. At about this time rebooting it corrupted the registry and I would have to reinstall most of the drivers and some of the applications. After a hard reboot my Cdrive crashed and I replaced it.

To fix the system I:
1. Updated NIC drivers
This did not fix the problem and the situation got worse.
2. Replaced the RAM
This did not fix the problem and the situation got worse.
3. Replaced the powersupply
I think I screwed the motherboard while doing this because the system did not boot at all.

I needed a working computer for my job so I decided to do a cpu\motherboard upgrade.

 

[Lore]

What heatsink did you go for?

 

[Siddhartha]

I got the retail XP1900+. It is so quiet compared to the globewin 38 I have on the Tbird 1.33 that when I first turned it on I had to look to make sure it was running. Using the retail heatsink\fan, the cpu seems to be running hotter than the Tbird\globwin system. I will keep an eye on temperature but having a quieter room is worth it so far.

 

[Lore]

Oh, good call. I'll recommend that to my friend.

 

[rockhard]

John's on the ball, as i too have found upgrading my CPU and Ram to be an anticlimax if im honest with myself 🙁
The only thing i really felt the most benefit from was upgrading my IBM GXP 34 IDE HD to a Maxtor Atlas 3 SCSI HD.
After using the SCSI HD i would feel very hard done by having to use a IDE HD again.
May be worth you looking at SCSI to round off your rig if youve got the money burning your pocket?

 

[mboy]

I just upgraded my old man to an XP1600, k7s5a, 256PC2100, 40GB 7200 from a Compaq 500Mhz w/64mb. Want to talk about a screaming difference? He cant believe it!