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Which upgrade, CPU or MOtherboard?

D

Danella

Member
I just completed building a computer system about 2 month ago. now I'm looking for which step to take next.

System is Soltek SL75KAV, w/256 Meg PC133, and an athlon 1.0 Ghz CPU.

Eventually I will upgrade the entire system, but I'm ready to take the first step now. My intended goal is an Athlon XP 1800+, with a DDR Motherboard. If I buy the XP 1800 and install it on existing Motherboard with PC133, will there be a significant improvement ,or will the pc133 bottleneck the potential of the XP 1800? By the same token, changing to a DDR motherboard w/PC2100, will my Athlon 1 Ghz really take advantage of the DDR memory.

The question is, which change will show me the best improvement for the time being. I want to tinker and upgrade, but can't do both at the same time with my limited budget.

Any Suggestions?
Thank You,
Dan
 
Dan,

Really a personal decision, but if I was to make the same one..... I would get the motherboard first and allow the 1800+ to drop in price some more.
 
Dan,

PLEASE do yourself a favor, SAVE the $$$ for a couple months and get a LOWER price on the motherboard and BUY A HAMMER PROCESSOR! 😀 I haven't checked the AMD roadmap for processors...but I think I heard something about end of THIS month/beginning of next month they'll start selling them! THAT wouLD ROCK to get on of them! 😀
 
Tanner, Hammer (Clawhammer for workstations or Sledgehammer for servers) is a 64-bit CPU, and will be supported (so far as I am aware) by the 8000 series chipset (and maybe by future third-party chipsets), so will not be usable in current boards anyway. The boards themselves are going to be targeted at the professional workstation/commodity server market, and they are probably, therefore, going to cost a fair amount. See AMD Hammer info
for details.
Danella, if what you're going for is a performance boost then I'm afraid that I would go for the XP1800, although I would check the PCB revision number of your board to make sure that it supports the Athlon XP (must be F1 or later, I understand, check at Soltek's website ). Either way you cut it, you're not going to get your ideal system without BOTH the 1800XP AND DDR, but I would expect the superior architecture and better application support from the XP to provide improvements above and beyond mere clock speed (neat stuff like data prefetch and SSE support). The bandwidth "bottleneck" is likely to have less of an impact upon you than missing these enhancements.
 
WOW, A lot of quick responses....

I guess the first thing to do, when I get home tonight, is open my case, and see what version of the board I have, that could eliminate the choice all together.

If I wait for the price to drop, that would mean the value of my Athlon 1 Ghz will probably also drop, which I will expect to gain a little return on it's value to put toward the rest of the upgrade. Likewise, the version of the Mobo will determine it's value in trade for a CPU. guess it's time to weigh what I have against the price/timeline.

Thanks for the input, I was kind of figuring the best performance would be the XP1800 first, but wanted a little input from others first.

Thx for the help,
Dan
 
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