dual p3 or Athlon?

[Dickie]

Hello.
I've got a dual p3 motherboard lying around doing nothing, and i want to build a second rig. However, p3s are still quite expensive.

So i was thinking about junking that mobo, and building a cheap little athlon rig with a cheap mobo and one of those cheap mobile athlons in the bargain hunt forum. Which would be fastest?

[Lee H]

I'd go down the dual MP route as they have more technological advancements than the Pentium 3 and also run at better clock speeds. They have the following improvements on them to make them perform quite well as well ;

QuantiSpeed™ Architecture for Rapid Execution of Applications
Smarter Multiprocessing with Smart MP Technology

If you get the newer 2800+ MP "barton" chips then these have 512 Kb level 2 cache and are based on the same manufacturing process of the XP's and run @ 333 Mhz FSB as well rather than 266 so this will also improve performance.

Hope this info helps

Lee

[Dickie]

i mean single athlon.

unless i can find a cheap dual MP board somewhere...

[Rave]

Cheap Athlon MP boards can be had secondhand, but obviously it depends on you being lucky enough to find someone selling at the right price. The big advantage of dual Athlon boards is that you can modify pre 0339 Athlon XPs to work as Athlon MPs with a bit of conductive paint. Then you can use pin mods to set the voltage and clockspeed how you want it.

A combination of a cheap Nforce2 motherboard and a mobile Barton clocked to 2.2GHz or more will be faster than Dual P3s for almost everything, but the P3s might still give you the 'smoother' computing experience- multitasking might still be better.

Rich :¬)

[BlackSheep]

If you are running a single XP chip at 2.2Ghz on an NF2 it is going to kill anything you throw at dual P3's.

[Rave]

BTW, don't 'junk' the mobo- there are a lot of people who won't consider dual Athlons for reasons of snobery or stupidity, so dual P3 boards are worth more than they really should be. Depending on what board it is you could be halfway to financing the Barton/NF2 combo just by selling it.

Rich :¬)

[Dickie]

BTW, don't 'junk' the mobo- there are a lot of people who won't consider dual Athlons for reasons of snobery or stupidity, so dual P3 boards are worth more than they really should be. Depending on what board it is you could be halfway to financing the Barton/NF2 combo just by selling it.

Rich :¬)

oh yeah. by "junk", i meant flog, of course.