AMD Athlon XP kicks butt =D

Cerulean

Cerulean

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I used to have a computer with an Athlon XP overclocked by ~1GHz. It was teh sweets. It has been probably around 4-6 years since then. Been with a 3.2GHz+ Q9450 and all..

then, at work, I stumble across a 1.2GHz to 1.6GHz Athlon XP machine with only 512MB of DDR RAM. All the other workstations have something like 2.4GHz to 2.8GHz Celeron (celery sticks, yum, gotta love it) and 768MB PC133/DDR RAM (one or two have PC133).

In comparison.. the Athlon XP machine is just amazingly responsive, snappy, and instantaneous. It gives me a jaw dropper. :eek: All the other workstations are clearly lesser in performance and snappiness. Glad I had an Athlon XP in the old days. :D

(Note: all the computers are about the same in the way Windows XP and software is setup on them. This includes nightly defragments and having recently run CCleaner on them all; Athlon XP was still relatively wicked before doing CCleaner+nightly defrag schedule.)
 
Most of the early Celerons were big POS's. The only one worth a damn was the old 300a.
 
yea the AMD's blew away the celerons due to their far superior CPU instructions. Ghz isn't everything!
 
I had an Athlon XP at one point and yes, they were very good chips for their time. They blew away most of what Intel had out at the time, if I recall.

Really most of that generation AMD was ahead. My first self built PC was an AMD 2000+ and that thing just flew with windows 2000. Good times.
 
slayer9019 said:
yea the AMD's blew away the celerons due to their far superior CPU instructions. Ghz isn't everything!
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I would say more due to the extreme lack of cache than the clockspeed. At the same time, the Northwoods with HyperThreading were smoking the Athlon XP's relatively speaking. I used both, and it was fun to run a Barton 2500+ or an XP-M way faster than it should have been :).
 
pfft I just built a AMD Duron out of spare parts, quite snappy for what it was
 
I just found my old XP 2000+ setup w/ A7n8x Deluxe mobo. First computer I put together myself and it was blazing fast for it's time. I wanted to turn it into a HTPC or something but I doubt it would be worth the effort :/
 
The only reason the Celeron series exists is because Intel wanted to profit off of defective Pentium chips. They burned out defective regions of the cache and sold them as the budget-minded Celeron chip. Simply put--they're defects, of course they suck.
 
You could say the same thing about X3 chips at least some of them.

Or if you think even deeper (about the process of making chips) all chips that are not the highest binned chips are defects.

Why are we discussing chips from 8 to 10 years ago that have almost no value today?
 
I still have 2 working Athlon XP boxes here:
XP Barton 2500+ on a Shuttle MN31N
XP-M Barton 2500+ on a Shuttle AN35N

Plus another mobo sitting down here with
XP-M Barton 2500+ on a Biostar M7NCG-400

And a bare CPU
XP 1800+ JIUHB

Not to mention the Ti4200, 2 Radeon 9550's and a 6600GT from those days. Basically a perfect set of parts for a UT2004 LAN Party.
 
I have retired probably 40 Athlon XP cores at work because they are too slow for my users. And I probably have at least 5 XP chips sitting somewhere in my house. I would have sold them if there was any value in that.
 
I had a 2500+ barton that I OC'd to 2.6ghz back in the day. Was a champ...eventually upgraded to an Opteron 148 that went to 3.2ghz :D
 
I built my first system using a 2200+ back in the day. Then I moved to a 2800+ Barton on H2O at 2.8GHz and it was all downhill from there :D I remember I built it so I could play UT2K3 after demoing it my local CompUSA.

Oh shit I found a picture of it!
100_0792Large.jpg


Yea boyyyyyyyyyyyyy!!!
 
I loved my old Athlon XP 2100+ Palamino which I had overclocked to 1.9Ghz. Paired it with an awesome Epox Nforce 2 motherboard and an unlocked 9500Pro for some great fun. I wished I'd never given that away.
 
Still have an Athlon XP 1700+ JIUHB running 2200Mhz with an SLK-800 Cooler. Only thing i've done to it since the day i bought it was replace the deafening vantec tornado with a nice quiet 80mm fan. It's in an abit NF-7 board too, which is probably one of my favorite boards.
 
My file server is a retired gaming machine from years ago. Athlon 2400+, gigabyte mobo, 1GB of DDR, ATi 9600pro. Still running strong, but it doesn't get pushed much anymore being a server.
 
Far from being worthless, these chips still work for a lot of people and can be found for reasonable prices. My wife is using my old Compaq with an XP2200 in it and it still does what she needs it to do. If you've got a few of them laying around you could probably sell them and have enought for a decent X3 cpu. Valueless? Not really. One man's trash is another man's treasure.
 
For the amount of people selling Pentium 3 machines for 100 bucks on craigslist. Yeah, you could make that much easily with a system like that. :p
 
This is how I feel about any all AMD chips pre-dating Conroe. Everytime I sit down at a P4/Celeron machine I want to hang myself but if I sit down and use a A64 or an X2 it's actually a moderately pleasurable experience. I finally got rid of my s939 3200+ setup a few months ago and it chugged along fine in Win7 @ 2.8ghz w/ 2gb of RAM and it was even gaming capable with a 7800gt.
 
Valueless? Not really.
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My point (as a person having a few XP chips collecting dust) is there is no value for me to sell chips at $10 to $15 including shipping after having to travel 5 miles to the post office or 3 miles to the UPS store, stand in line for 10 to 15 minutes, pay eBay and paypal fees and finally pay for the shipping. I have lots of hardware like this.


Just looking at eBay. I probably would not even get that. There are a few lots of 10 to 17 Athlon XPs going for $25 US and other individual chips going for less.
 
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drescherjm said:
My point (as a person having a few XP chips collecting dust) is there is no value for me to sell chips at $10 to $15 including shipping after having to travel 5 miles to the post office or 3 miles to the UPS store, stand in line for 10 to 15 minutes, pay eBay and paypal fees and finally pay for the shipping. I have lots of hardware like this.


Just looking at eBay. I probably would not even get that. There are a few lots of 10 to 17 Athlon XPs going for $25 US and other individual chips going for less.
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Why in the world would you pay the shipping? You can send a cpu for $2 - $4 or so. Let the buyer pay the shipping - I do - and ebay charges are peanuts, really. If you have "lots of hardware like this" you'd still make some cash. If I had as much hardware as you seem to I'd do it - especially with the economy the way it is for me right now. Of course, if you aren't stretched financially I can see your point.
 
Astronomica said:
Still have an Athlon XP 1700+ JIUHB running 2200Mhz with an SLK-800 Cooler. Only thing i've done to it since the day i bought it was replace the deafening vantec tornado with a nice quiet 80mm fan. It's in an abit NF-7 board too, which is probably one of my favorite boards.
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Had a 1700+ XPMW @ 2.2 I got from monarch with a Sunon 50cfm 80mm fan volcano 9 heatsink I think it was. That rig was awesome..but dude those volcanos were loud as hell lol.
Had a EPoX 8RGA+ mobo too..wish they still made mobos.
 
BigMacAttack said:
Why in the world would you pay the shipping?
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Because if you look at the other listings for single Athlon XP processors on eBay most of them the seller pays the shipping.. I guess FS/T or other places you can get the buyer to pay.

Of course, if you aren't stretched financially I can see your point.
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I am not. I guess I have been lucky to be better off each year since 1994 (when I got my first job).
 
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I bench a lot of different platforms and socket 462 is still by a long shot my favorite. I'm still a little bit surprised when I pop in a good stepping Barton and see it's performance. Never get's old.

Barton + BH-5 + Ultra B + 7900GS = pure win IMO.

I'll gladly buy those "worthless" Athlon XP's off ya.;)
 
I would rather have a northwood P4 with HT if I were building an old box imho. While I was a fan of Athlon XPs (I owned 2100, 2500, and 3200 at one point) I felt like my P4 3.0c was faster than those in general use.

While this trip down memory lane is fun, I think we are all getting a bit teary eyed, and remembering those machines better than they really were. Athlon XP was great in terms of the performance per dollar for its day, but if I had to be stuck with a PC from that era to use today as a general purpose PC, I would easily pick a hyperthreaded P4.
 
jebo_4jc said:
I would rather have a northwood P4 with HT if I were building an old box imho. While I was a fan of Athlon XPs (I owned 2100, 2500, and 3200 at one point) I felt like my P4 3.0c was faster than those in general use.

While this trip down memory lane is fun, I think we are all getting a bit teary eyed, and remembering those machines better than they really were. Athlon XP was great in terms of the performance per dollar for its day, but if I had to be stuck with a PC from that era to use today as a general purpose PC, I would easily pick a hyperthreaded P4.
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Except that by the time the P4's with HT were released the Athlon XP line was near it's end. In fact just a few months after the introduction of the "HT" models AMD released their first Athlon 64's effectively spelling the beginning of the end for P4 HT as the short lived king of performance. Not very long after that the socket 939 Athlon 64's were released then a year later the X2's while Intel was desperately trying to squeeze more of the already inefficient Netburst architecture with the Pentium D. So if we are talking of that "era" I'll take an Athlon 64 X2.

For a long period of time there was no CPU that could compete with the Athlon XP clock for clock in terms of performance including the Pentium 4.
 
Not sure if I can say that the northwood system I had was faster or not. I remember my Athlon XP system being one of my favorite ever though. I just remember the Athlon being much more responsive than the intel stuff I had at the time.
 
Still have a few XP's kicking around, and still have two setups that run an XP 3200+ w/ dual-channel DDR @ 400FSB. :)
 
OptyTrooper said:
Except that by the time the P4's with HT were released the Athlon XP line was near it's end. In fact just a few months after the introduction of the "HT" models AMD released their first Athlon 64's effectively spelling the beginning of the end for P4 HT as the short lived king of performance
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I don't think so. HT was introduced in 2002, but the Athlon 64 was released in late 2003/early 2004.
 
HT became a bigger deal with the 800mhz FSB and the 865/875 chipsets (April/May 2003). The only chip that ran it before that was the 3.06Ghz P4 533 chip which was/is expensive, but ran on most of the older 845PE chipsets. Athlon 64 was later in 2003 (September for the FX-51 IIRC).

I always thought the Northwoods with HT felt smoother than the AXP's, but I rarely used them side by side, so it could have just been my imagination.
 
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