Upgrade? SocketA still out there?

[BoboKatt]

Hi all,
I hate to ask such a general question but I need to upgrade my dad's AMDX 2500+ (Barton). He is using socketA I think??? Has an older Asus board. If i stick with this socketA... how much higher can I go say with a Sampron? do they even make Samprons in this socket? What about the mobile XP... or are they socketA or something else? If I am stuck with this to go to a new Sampron that is socket 754 or even 939.. would he actually notice any improvement over the current Barton running at 1833Mhz? Dont' even know what flavours Samprons now run and how much a very basic board would cost. Might be better just to get a new board and a faster Sampron than look for the impossible.

Thanks
Bob

 

[PingSpike]

My advice is to sell your socket A stuff and buy a socket 754 board and a sempron with 256k cache, palermo core.

 

[Wentelteefje]

In all three cases the answer is "Socket A" (or maybe yes on the Sempron question)... Well, you could start with trying to overclock the AXP 2500+... If your mobo supports it, you can get a nice boost out of it...

The fastest Sempron AMD offers for Socket A is a 2800+... That one only has half the cache of your AXP 2500+ and runs at 2.0GHz... So not to say it's going to be like night and day... If you can't overclock with your motherboard, a Mobile Athlon XP will be wasted money, because these chips only shine when overclocked...

Semprons are available for Socket 754 and 939 (however, the latter ones are only OEM's at the moment), and they will give you a reasonable speed boost over the Socket A chips... Besides, they are more advanced, having 64-bit functionality and an integrated memory controller...

Basic Socket 754 boards are available from $ 50 and up, but you might want to spend a little more and get a board to overclock the Sempron, they're very good at it, and it'll reward you with a very nice speed boost... I have a Sempron 64 2800+ (nominal speed 1.6GHz) overclocked to 2.6GHz, and I often surpass my other AMD Athlon 64 3800+...

So, getting yourself a S754 board with a cheap and overclockable Sempron might indeed be a good choice...

BTW, where does your father use his comp for?

 

[sandorski]

Overclock or upgrade like posted above.

 

[BoboKatt]

Wow thanks for that explanation Wentelteefje. My father uses it for "basic" computing however... and it's a big one... he has at any given time, Outlook open with his PDA hooked up and constantly updating and working on meetings and such. He has usually 2 to 3 webpages open. He has Excel and Word open for documents and then there are the 1000 freaking things he has running in the background such as all the CRAP from AOL that runs, he Skype which he uses a lot, his brand new Norton 2006 that I am sure with the dashboard is running all the time, and then the crap. He does not game if that's a question nor does he encode or rip or any of that "young" stuff. Anyhow for him I noted his biggest improvement came when I went from his older 10Gig drive (which unbelievably was enough space for him) to a 250GB IDE drive. He certainly does not need the space but at that time the upgrade cost of that over say an 80 GB (which was the smallest new one I could find) was like $30. It was stupid not to get the 250. Anyhow he swears now that it' made his responsiveness so much better. Anyhow I was more worried as he managed to burn out one of the DIMM< slots of his board and also scratched or put a huge scratch on the board when he tried to install the CPU heatsink and fan with me. From that day on we have NOT being able to run anything other than stock (and I mean rock bottom stock speed)... the CPU runs very hot even though we have AS compound and an aftermarket cooler and heatsink and he cannot use one of the DIMM slots as it's burned out. Also the RAM which is actually DDR400 wont run at 166Mhz on that ASUS board (as the Barton runs 166 core so all i asked for is the RAM to run 1:1) but it crashes at that.

All this to say LOL. yeah looks like i might just get a sock 754 board with a Samp 3 or 2.8 and OC it. Any recommendation on a heatsink/fan for it>? are you using water cooling to get that INSANE oc?? I would love to be able to OC my own computer (x2 3800+ to that speed LOL). But would be happy to get him a samp at 3 or 2.8 as you said and just be happy with a 2.4 final CPU speed.

Thanks again,

Robert

 

[imported_Kiwi]

Originally posted by: BoboKatt
Hi all,
I hate to ask such a general question but I need to upgrade my dad's AMDX 2500+ (Barton). He is using socket A I think? Has an older Asus board. If i{I} stick with this socket A... how much higher can I go say with a Sampron? d{D}o they even make Samprons in this socket?

The last new production was ended many months ago, but at the time, the channel still had many XP's in it, probably a lot more than SEmprons. The last month that any Socket A cpu's were being produced, they were all Semprons, though.

What about the mobile XP... or are they socket A or something else?

There is probably a better supply pf XP-M's still available than Semprons.

To go to a new Sampron that is socket 754 or even 939.. would he actually notice any improvement over the current Barton running at 1833Mhz? Dont' even know what flavours Samprons now run and how much a very basic board would cost. Might be better just to get a new board and a faster Sampron than look for the impossible.

The Sempron is still a Sempron when it is the name of an A64-related cpu. It doesn't automatically change the second letter in its name.

Because the A64's feature an included memory management circuit inside the cpu, that makes them more efficient, so unless you picked one that was running slower than the Barton 2500, or had less cache aboard, the newer system should be readily noted as being faster.

 

[Wentelteefje]

If your father uses his comp for basic computing, he probably doesn't need an external video card, does he? If not, this Biostar motherboard for Socket 754 is absolutely incredible... It's MicroATX but overclocks like hell, and has a PCIe16x and PCIe1x slot for future upgrades (if needed)... It "only" has 2 memory slots, but seeing that he's not a gamer, that should suffice...

If you'd rather want an ATX board that overclocks even better, either this Abit NV8 (flash to the latest BIOS!) or this DFI nF4x Infinity will be great, preferably the latter... However, you will need an external PCIe graphics for these...

Couple one of these boards with an AMD Sempron 64 2800+ (pick it above a 2600+, because that one has the same speed, but only half the cache), and overclocking to 2.4GHz or more should be absolutely no problem...

As for myself, I am using the NV8 (BIOS 1.2) and a GlacialTech Igloo 7200 Light... It's not a fabulous cooler (temps rise up to 52°C under load), but it's very silent... My recommendation for a high-quality heatsink is always to pick an Arctic Cooling Freezer 64 Pro... They're simply amazing, performing like absolute high-end coolers, but with a mid-range price... Very quiet as well... If you'd like to push your X2, one of these will make sure it's not getting too hot...

In comparison to his older 10GB disk, the newer one features a much higher speed and lots more cache... So it must have been quite an improvement indeed...