Upgrade help: Athlon XP 2500

[heasty]

Sorry if this is the wrong forum, and yes I tried the search but maybe I'm an idiot (or just a noob).

So I'm looking to upgrade my PC.

MOBO: Albatron KX18D Pro
CPU: AMD Athlon XP 2500 + 1.83 Ghz (according to Vista)

Trying to figure out if I can upgrade the processor with the existing MOBO, but I'm having trouble finding a good list of exact models I could use.

Can anyone help? I realize the MOBO is old(er), but I'd rather just upgrade the CPU if possible.

 

[epsilon84]

I wouldn't bother if I were you. The fastest CPU your board will support is an Athlon XP 3200+, which isn't a whole lot faster than your 2500+ anyway. Since it's a discontinued product, it still charges a pretty hefty premium, around $100 IIRC. You can get a new CPU that is at least twice as powerful for that amount of money. It is never wise to invest in obsolete technology.

I'm afraid it is time to build a new PC. If you just want a temporary speed increase, you can always overclock your 2500+ to 3200+ speeds (2.2GHz).

 

[g-paw]

I wouldn't bother if I were you. The fastest CPU your board will support is an Athlon XP 3200+, which isn't a whole lot faster than your 2500+ anyway. Since it's a discontinued product, it still charges a pretty hefty premium, around $100 IIRC. You can get a new CPU that is at least twice as powerful for that amount of money. It is never wise to invest in obsolete technology.

I'm afraid it is time to build a new PC. If you just want a temporary speed increase, you can always overclock your 2500+ to 3200+ speeds (2.2GHz).

Agree. You good increase the RAM to 1GB or 2GB depending on what you're currently run, will do more than anything to speed things up for $

 

[notherdude]

Ditto.
Get two gig of RAM if you want Vista on it.
But I'd be a little leery about putting Vista on a box that old.

I had a 2500+ I retired just recently. I managed to salvage my nice AGP video card and my DDR RAM though. I just bought a used Asrock board and an Opteron 180 which runs nice at 2700 ghz. er . . make that 2.7ghz

CRUSHES the old 2500+.

Even with that I decided to keep XP. I do have Vista 64 running on my main box with a core2duo @3.5 ghz and 6 gig of RAM. No complaints with Vista there, smooth as silk and pretty too.

 

[harna]

Hi heasty your model appears to be a Barton cpu. Since Barton was the latest design for that platform it is likely in this case your mobo will run any Socket A Athlon or Sempron processor of any speed.

As for Ms VISTA's its biggest issue with socket A was it's basic barely adequate inbuilt support for the mobos nForce 2 chipset which has crippled the platforms overall performance in that OS. It's rather unfair, but Nvidia chose not to release drivers for windows VISTA so perhaps it would be better to remain with Windows xp. I currently have VISTA on A64 X2 3800+ 2Gb RAM. It works ok, but am not bothering to obtain it for my 5000+ BE as I haven't noticed any real benefit of the OS for general use, just more resource hungry and very sluggish performance.

After seeing how much more smoothly Crysis runs on XP I am more than convinced than ever that Ms VISTA 32 was/is a stupid mistake made by Microsoft and is as compelling an upgrade as Ms Me_Lemon was for Win 98. This OS should have been exclusively 64 bit - period, and let XP be the transition OS with 32 & 64 bit editions.

 

[jaguarskx]

The Athlon XP 2500+ was a great CPU when it was released.

If you are looking to upgrade, then you should consider putting your entire PC out the pasture. I'm going to retire my HTPC built around an Athlon XP-M 2600 + by this summer.

 

[heasty]

Thanks for your help everybody. Sound like any upgrades are just a short lived stop-gap at this point.

I appreciate the hepl!

 

[purplerat]

I think it's time to consider a whole new build if I were you. Not only is your CPU not dual core, it's not even the generation of single core that came before dual cores. Oddly though you may be able to get decent money for your CPU and motherboard on ebay. Socket A motherboards are hard to find and somebody looking to keep an old system alive might give you a pretty good price on it. Also the XP2500+ was a hell of a CPU in it's day and could fetch a few bucks also based on it's reputation (albeit an old one).

 

[cah027]

I am in the same boat. I am holding off as long as I can. I have a small gaming hobby and video editing hobby but I am to busy working to justify not waiting for the real next gen stuff to come out (Nehalm/Fusion or whatever its called/spelled).

I got my 2400+ up to 2600+ speeds and is running very stable. Not a big boost but it works. I have 2x512mb which was an upgrade from 2x256. My father inlaw had some and donated it to my cause. He might be able to get me more ram later.

I also have oddly enough a U160 scsi controller with a U320 36GB 15K drive. I always run out of space on it. I have an external drive for storage and an old 80GB that is starting to give up the ghost.

I will probably keep the scsi setup as a swapfile for the next pc and sell everything else on eBay.

So I know what you are feeling right now.

 

[purplerat]

waiting for the real next gen stuff to come out

I'm not sure exactly what you mean by 'real next gen'? Theres been at least 4 new generations of CPU since AthlonXP/P3. If your happy with what you have now then all the power to you. However I'd say at this point playing the waiting game for the "next big thing" is going to have diminishing returns. The difference between the CPUs out today, including those released this week, and those coming out at the end of this year are miniscule compared to the difference between what you have and what you could get now.

 

[notherdude]

I had a 2500+ stable at 2.9 ghz! I could bench it at 3.

With a Prometia phase change cooler.

 

[purplerat]

Mine went easily to 2.5 on air. I'd heard that with decent watercooling you could get it to 3.2.

 

[rallyimprezive]

Ditto.
Get two gig of RAM if you want Vista on it.
But I'd be a little leery about putting Vista on a box that old.

I had a 2500+ I retired just recently. I managed to salvage my nice AGP video card and my DDR RAM though. I just bought a used Asrock board and an Opteron 180 which runs nice at 2700 ghz.

CRUSHES the old 2500+.

Even with that I decided to keep XP. I do have Vista 64 running on my main box with a core2duo @3.5 ghz and 6 gig of RAM. No complaints with Vista there, smooth as silk and pretty too.

Whoa, that is really fast!

To the OP: Save your pennies man, it is time for a new PC!!

You have waited so long that a new PC will seem so fast you'll get a nose bleed. I kinda wish I could experience that level of performance increase.

 

[notherdude]

Whoa, that is really fast!

To the OP: Save your pennies man, it is time for a new PC!!

You have waited so long that a new PC will seem so fast you'll get a nose bleed. I kinda wish I could experience that level of performance increase.

Yes, you heard me, 2700 ghz! I'll be setting all the benchmark records any day now, as soon as I get done playing Crysis fully cranked at 5000 fps