Muckhead's Chronicle

I'd go with the Barton... if you have the cashola though, I'd go for the new Athlon 64-bit processor. :)

And, of course, if you want to ship your old processor and motherboard my way... feel free! :)

Not much supports 64bit yet, so probably not worth the $ unless you're trying to be extra progressive. The barton basically has extra cache which gives it a speed boost over the normal XP.

Basically I looked at the prices and see where the big jump occurs. A few months back it was the xp2600 (when I upgraded). Right now it seems to be around the 2800. Modify to account for your budget of course :)

I would check out the Giga-byte GA-7VT600PL A-Power has it on for $93. Will handle your current CPU or depending on the BUS Speed up to the 3200+. It will run the XP BArton 2500+ which has the best price point right now. Also this motherboard has both ATA-133 and SATA two each so you can use your current drives but still move to the newer SATA drives if you want. It should work well now and leave room for upgrade.

I did some simple calculations on the processors and prices for each and found the following:

MHz Per Dollar Spent based on actual GHz speed

1.83 (2500+) 14186.05 MHz/$
1.91 (2600+) 12565.79 MHz/$
2.08 (2800+) 10146.34 MHz/$
2.17 (3000+) 7614.04 MHz/$
2.2 (3200+) 5011.39 MHz/$

If you base it upon the Rated Speed (ie: 2500 2.5Ghz) the figures change a little bit but the order stays the same.

2.5 (2500+) 19379.84 MHz/$
2.6 (2600+) 17105.26 MHz/$
2.8 (2800+) 13658.54 MHz/$
3.0 (3000+) 10526.32 MHz/$
3.2 (3200+) 7289.29 MHz/$

If you've got money to spend, my suggestion is not NOT upgrade from that processor.

Instead, spend it on a good SCSI drive and a decent controller. You will notice a BIG difference in the responsiveness of your system.

Unfortunately I have only buttons, so I cannot afford the almost $2500 it would cost to equal the same drive space I currently possess in SCSI.
So, I am still looking at a faster processor; what I didn't mention is that I am upgrading a friend’s computer with my board, so the board is a must component that will need to be changed.
Thanks for the suggestions, I think Bear and I are heading down to A-Power later in the week.

I didn't say to *replace* the hard drives you have...

Just add a smaller SCSI drive (bigger ones are expensive). Maxtor has a 15,000 RPM 18gb drive for under $300, Seagate's is about $330. Controllers for can be had for about $50-$150.

Yes, that's more bucks per gigabyte. However, you can keep all your ISOs, downloads, tunes, movies, pictures (!!!!!), and so on on the bigger PATA/SATA drives that you have. Put the Operating System, applications, swap files, databases, code etc on the SCSI and you'll still have lots of room to spare.

Yes, I'm biased towards SCSI and highly recommend anyone I see to get it... but that's because I've used it and felt the difference it made in things like VMWare and so on. I'm on a laptop now, but I still miss having that drive... 4300 rpm vs 1500rpm is a big difference.