Which to buy?

[Daphyl]

Being a poor person, I can't afford new hardware and I have to wait until things are several generations old. So, here's what I'd like to know...
I've got a Athlon 2000XP and I'd like to buy a 2600.
Can anyone out there give me the pros and cons between the Thoroughbred and the Barton (besides the $15 price difference)? The only difference that I see is the Cache size.

Thanks,
Daphyl

[Keith75]

Hi, I wanted to tell you my opinion since I just bought one of the Barton 2500s this weekend on an impulse. :D I had a 2400+ that was running at 2.2 GHz and replaced it with the 2500+ Barton and immediately overclocked it to 2.2 GHz as well. It is hard to tell exactly how much faster it is but I did record a few benchmarks before and after. With both running at the same speed the Barton was faster in every Benchmark I have run so far. Another nice thing about the Barton is that you can easily overclock it more. To run my 2400 at 2.2 GHz I had to use 1.75 volts and to get my 2500 to do it only requires 1.7 volts and it started out 200 MHz slower than the 2400!! So i would definitely go with the Barton but only if you plan to overclock it a little bit. If you run it and a 2600 at stock speeds the 2600 would probably be faster. What motherboard do you have? Sorry if I got long winded.

Keith

[Arminiusc]

Keith... can you clock your barton back to normal speed and rerun some of those benchmarks just to find out if the barton is any faster or slower in stock configuration? :)
I think alot of people would like to know the answer to that. :)

[Keith75]

I ran alot of the benchmarks at stock speed and the answer to that is that the 2400+ would beat it in most of them. It runs at 1.8 GHz and does about the same as a T'bred running about 50-100 MHz faster. It seemed to do better than that when it came to cache & memory benchmark in Sandra and I also noticed an improvement in 3dMark 2001 and 2003. In 2001 I went from 14500 with the 2.2GHz 2400 up to 14200 with the stock 1.8 GHz Barton. When I overclocked the Barton up to the 2400s speed my score jumped up to 15,900. So it definitely does more work per CPU cycle, it's just that starting out so much slower more than makes up for this. Believe me though, running both stock a 2400 would beat the Barton in 90% of benchmarks. If you have something specific you would like me to test I certainly can. Not sure if Sandra is what you guys use or something else.

Keith

[Arminiusc]

Thanks for the stats Keith. Those answered all my questions I had about the Barton. :)