To Barton or not to barton...that is the question.

[SoopaStar]

Looking to upgrade my system in pieces. Bought the Asus A7n8X Deluxe board not too long ago. Now I want to do thte CPU and then the memory.
Right now I am using a 1.4ghz tbird and pc2700 ram. I want to go to a 2500+ or higher CPU, but I can't decide if I want to do barton or not. The 512k of cache looks really inviting, but the clock speed seems to be slower on teh barton core CPU's compared to the other XP processors.
Anyone have a good article or comparo that shows the differences between similarly rated CPUS (EG: 2600+ XP vs 2600+ XP w/ barton core)?

Paul

[keith]

sorry Paul I couldnt find a site that directly compared the barton to the thoroughbred at 2600 speeds. But I did find two reviews from the same site that reviews each individually:

http://www.sharkyextreme.com/hardware/cpu/article.php/1450561
http://www.sharkyextreme.com/hardware/cpu/article.php/3261_1582091__2

from the quick read of them it seems that although the barton is lower in clock speed the increase in fsb seems to remove a bottleneck that systems seemed to have. And hell with the pc2700 you have you might as well have a chip to match - go with the barton I say :)

[SoopaStar]

thanks. Well, when I upgrade the CPU, the next step will be some low latency ram to take advantage of the nvidia's dual channel DDR setup. probably corsair twinX, some Geil ram from Ocsystem.com or something like that. Probably going to aim for 1gb (2x 512MB, cas2 etc).

Paul

[Win2Kuser]

Insidently, get PC3200 ram, set your multipliers to 11X200fsb and viola - you have a XP3.2+ Now thats what you call a cheap upgrade. :D