What should I upgrade to? Intel Northwood or Athlon XP?

[TheLizardMan]

Okay...

If I get a Northwood would i hit 2.2ghz at least with no problem at all? or do some people only get to 1.7 or 1.8?
Also... are there any good northwood cpus left? new egg has some 1.6a's but they are listed as "INTEL PENTIUM 4 1.6GHz 400MHz SOCKET 478 PROCESSOR" only their 2.0+ ghz cpus have "Northwood" printed next to the discription.

Also the guys over at the hard forum like the epox boards, you guys seem to like the asus boards. What one really is the best board for OC'n and perfomance/benchmarking.

Also... If i got a AMD chipset, should I get a 1800+ now or wait till the hammers come out and get a 2000+ on sale?

 

[Rkonster]

I would say that nearly all 1.6a's can hit 2.13. I personally haven't seen one that can't. Oh, and btw, newegg carries both the 1.6 and the 1.6a. You can tell which is which by looking at the l2 cache. The 1.6a has 512 instead of 256.

 

[o1die]

I would wait a few more days until the May 25th price drop. The newest chipset for the P4 is the Intel 845g. Three boards are listed on pricewatch, but I would wait for the asus or abit offerings.

 

[TheLizardMan]

I guess that I can wait until june.

 

[Migroo]

When comparing the simple performance of the CPUs, I think that its general opinion that the Northwoods have to be overclocked to get anywhere near the performance of the Athlon XPs.

Running a stock system, the Athlon XPs are cheaper, and running an overclocked system requires fast ram etc for the Northwood - yet more expence...


Its up tp you though, everyone has their favoured system, and people get good results from both CPUs.

 

[TheLizardMan]

as of now this is what im looking at.....

----------------------------------
$116 ABIT KX7-333
$131 AMD ATHLON XP 1900+/266 FSB PROCESSOR CPU - OEM
-------------- OR ------------
$103 ASUS P4B266-C
$130 Intel Pentium 4 1.6A GHz 512K Socket 478 Processor 400MHz Processor Bus - RETAIL
----------------------------------

The rest of the rig would be...

Samsung Original DDR333 PC-2700 512mb CAS2.5
WD WESTERN DIGITAL 80GB 7200RPM 8mb WD800JB
Antec 430W Power Supply TRUE430

 

[lookin4dlz]

Lizard - because you're going to oc, definitely the Intel platform. Based on the reviews I've seen, I'd switch out to an 845G chipset motherboard (see Tomshardware for review, although he's changed the review & replaced "845G" with "futurechipset1"). MSI has a 845G motherboard for the same price as the Asus you're looking at, but it won't ship until May 23.

Overclockers.com shows an average oc of 2379MHz

Thread on 845G motherboards includes link to pricewatch 845G motherboards and Tomshardware article.