Upgrade to Duron 850 or T-bird 750?

[fritzdog]

I?m going to upgrade my system from a Celeron 400 on an Asus P3B-F to an AMD system. I?m on a very limited budget and I?m trying to decide which would be better performance/overclocking ability. For about $90 from Mwave.com I can get a T-bird 750 or a Duron 850. I?m planning on getting the Asus A7V133 Motherboard and a Taisol HSF. I also have a V5500 graphic card and 192MB of PC 100 RAM that I will be reusing until I can afford higher speed memory. I primarily play flight sims.

Thanks, Fritzdog

 

[kylebisme]

the two will turn out about the same for you from all i know. in all likelyhood the durnon will overclock much higher than the tbird, however the tbirds cache will make up for that quite a bit. its realy a toss up.

 

[CichliSuite]

If you are contemplating a Duron, just get a lower speed (like 650 or a 600 if you can find one). The 600 or 650 will easily overclock as well, if not better than the 850. Save yourself some money and buy a good heatsink. When looking at the Duron line from an overlcocking point of view, the rated speeds become pretty meaningless since they all clock up to the same general 1 gig threshhold (although some actually prefer the lower-end models because of better overclockability). So you either can pay $90 for a Duron or $50 for one.

In terms of actual value, the T-bird is, then, more worth the $90 as it has the extra on-die cache.

 

[hclarkjr]

AMD just lowereed their prices in the last few days, for another $10 you can get a 800 MHZ thunderbird for $100 and overclock it to 950 or so. i just upgraded from duron to thunderbird and am still kicking myself in the a$$ for not getting the thunderbird when i first bought socket A board.

 

[greenbird750]

i think a t-bird 750 would be good. Mine is the green core (blues are better) and I still managed to get my chip stable at 1050mhz with 1.8v, not too shabby..

 

[BCYL]

I say get the T-bird also... I have the T-bird 700 and it's running stable at 909Mhz with crappy cooling... so with the 750 you can probably get it to run at 1Ghz...

But the on-die L2 cache will probably make it faster than the Duron...

 

[chrismcclellan]

The Duron (from what I've read) performs on average 90% of the equivalently clocked Tbird. Some things it performs exactly the same, others a little less, and certain programs that benefit heavily by the bigger cache size perform 10% faster on the Tbird. But my impression is that, as far as gaming goes, performs very nearly the same. So I guess it depends on what you use. If you're overclocking, I'd say I'd second the recommendation of getting a lower priced Duron--a 600MHz piece is only $42 on pricewatch.com.

 

[gtd2000]

Going from a C400 to a even a Duron 600 u will be impressed.

Get the lowest speed Duron out right now, overclock it - then - in 6 months time get the higher speed TB when it is half price - that's if you really think you need the extra performance!

 

[gtd2000]

Remember the Asus A7V133 may not be able to support the higher than 1.5Ghz CPU's.

I'm running on an Abit KT7A with Duron 700 @ 950Mhz btw