Upgrade PIII Slot1 machine or go Athlon/P4?

[Guest]

I currently have a Tyan S1832DL Slot1 100Mhz FSB Dual motherboard with 1 600Mhz PIII. I planned on simply buying a couple PIII 850Mhz chips and taking advantage of the SMP capability of the board. The board is documented on Tyan's website as accepting up to 850Mhz processors.

However, It seems the cost of PIII Slot1 chips have not come down all that much even though P4 chips running at much faster speeds are available.

My dilemna is whether I should buy 2 new PIII Slot1 850Mhz 100Mhz FSB (which are running around $144/each) or to simply forget my current motherboard and buy a new AthlonXP motherboard for around $120 and a new processor.

Which way will give me more upgrade room in the future? I tend to think the Dual PIII 850 solution is somewhat dead ended. The motherboard does not seems to allow anything faster than that period.

I run Linux with many different apps at once, plus I am a developer and am always running dmake, so I am sure SMP would give me quite a benefit.

What do you all think?

Chris

 

[Kelledin]

Another possibility to consider is going with Socket370 P3 850's and use a slocket adapter. A P3 850MHz currently costs about $120US in the Socket370 package.

Kelledin
[dave@discovery ~] kill -9 1
init: Just what do you think you're doing, Dave?

 

[MeTaLrOcKeR]

Well, even if u had Dual 850's....a single Athlon XP 1600+ would spank the P3's in benchmarks......

It's a question of what YOU want, overall it'll eb cheaper to get the Athlon XP.......cheaper for 1 XP than 2 P3's.....and the board, well it's $120 u said, so u figure it out, PLUS u have an upgrade path...anyways.....your choice.....If your gonan go P4, go with a board with the SiS645 DDR333 chipset.....good luck =)

-MeTaL RoCkEr

My <font color=red>Z28</font color=red> can take your <font color=blue>P4</font color=blue> off the line!

 

[upec]

I think it is better to change to Athlon. You should be able to get an Athlon XP 1600 for around 120. It should be faster than dual P3 for most application.

 

[bront]

The question is weather you will gain a lot from the Dual CPU setup.

If the answer is yes, you may want to wait till the AMD 760MXP boards come out, get one and an athlon XP, and save up for another one later. Or, just get either a matching PIII 600, or 2 PIII 850s (Slot or socket with a slocket card).

The athlon solution will give you future upgradability with the ability to go to a second processor, but will cost a bit more than a single processor solution for the Athlon.

If you don't need 2 CPUs (No big gain over 1 with your work), then the Athlon system is probably a better bang for your buck. Upgrading to dual CPUs on your board won't help that much anyway, and cost almost as much.

As far as P4 solutions, I don't know much about the Dual CPU options on those, and in general, any P4 solution tends to be more expensive ($400+ for good CPU and Mainboard).

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