Ancient hardware question - choosing between Sempron / Athlon XP

How about a poll for the hell of it? It's Easter after all, let's have some fun.

I rescued a small form factor PC + 17" Iiyama monitor from being chucked out by work recently. The PC is an Ideq 210v from circa 2004. It has a VIA KM400 chipset supporting up to 400mhz FSB.

Figured I'd play around with it, try some Linux on it, put LXLE on it which works OK.

Discovered it had a Sempron CPU in it. It was set by jumpers to run at 1.33Ghz at 266mhz FSB which was all wrong - it's a Sempron 2400+ so it's rated to run at 333mhz.

But I tried it, and it will actually run at 400mhz FSB at stock voltage = 2Ghz. The RAM installed is DDR-400, so that's nice.

All the same I picked up an Athlon 2500+ on ebay for the hefty sum of £2.50 heh. This CPU usually clocks at 1.83Ghz with a 333mhz rated FSB, though I selected it on the basis that many people report it will do 400mhz no problem as it shares the same Barton core with the 3200+. I figured if I got lucky I might effectively get a 3200+ (the fastest ever made for socket A) just by setting the bus to 400. It also has double the L2 cache of the Sempron - 512KB.

Sadly, it's not stable. I've got it to boot a few times and I suspect it would do it no problem, but I am limited by the BIOS in this old thing. I can't bump the vcore any higher and I don't think it will overclock at 1.63v.

So that leaves me with a choice between putting the Sempron back in or running the Athlon at 333mhz. I know there's probably not a huge amount of difference between the two, but every little helps with old hardware. Assuming it's being used for browsing + IRC, messing with Linux so doing installs, testing etc. which would you go with?

I've had a good history with Athlon XPs, so I'd recommend those. I've not actually used a Sempron, but I always thought they were more of a budget model? The extra cache is nice to have, although it doesn't sound like you'll be doing anything where performance is that big a deal.

I think Phobus is right, that Semprons were AMD's equivalent of the Celeron. Don't quote me on it, and I've just woken up, but it was my first gut reaction, even though I'm not 100% sure, and if that's the case, yeah, you're gonna wanna go with the Athlon.

Use the Sempron until it craps out, then use the Athlon.

I recently upgraded from a KM400/Sempron combo, largely because it was becoming intolerable. Even at full speed with max RAM you're in for a world of hurt. Browsing any site with Flash or even a couple scripts is impossible, and most media is now too big and would need recoding. Use it as a torrent box or fancy typewriter.

Today's Flash videos will cripple any single-core machine. They're choppy even on Pentium 4s. And forget full-screen video, unless it's a DVD. (With video-focused cards like the GeForce 9400GT, your mileage may vary.) But... I'm guessing you didn't catch the part where he said he'd put Linux on it.

I'd probably recommend benchmarking both processors and reporting what you find. But if I had to guess the Athlon will probably end up performing better on most applications. Typically when I see benchmarks on memory speed the results show minimal gain except in the synthetics, but it varies a bit by processor.

Scet said:

Browsing any site with Flash or even a couple scripts is impossible, and most media is now too big and would need recoding.

This is especially true since I retired my old socket A Athlon XP when Adobe started compiling flash with SSE2 optimizations enabled. (At least the Linux version.) Unless something changed in the last 6 months, the plugin will now just crash if run on anything less than a Pentium 4 or Athlon 64.

Bucket said:

But... I'm guessing you didn't catch the part where he said he'd put Linux on it.

No I didn't. I don't see what difference that makes.

Blzut3 said:

the plugin will now just crash

Yes, YouTube was especially bad in that regard. A lot of "an error has occurred" half way through every video. It got to the point I had to download videos from the listing page, but even that page was painfully slow.

Bucket said:

Today's Flash videos will cripple any single-core machine. They're choppy even on Pentium 4s. And forget full-screen video, unless it's a DVD.

In those cases, I use a tool such as JDownloader and play those videos through Media Player Classic (or any other native media player, after installing the CCCP codec pack). Problem solved, and even a Pentium 3 can handle 720p videos that way. The Flash-based video player is just plain inefficient, and even the built-in one in modern browsers (using the HTML tag) is not much better in this respect. I'm not going to upgrade a single core machine just so I can watch 240p or 360p videos again.

Scet said:

No I didn't. I don't see what difference that makes.

Adobe doesn't support Linux. As you might guess, the open source drivers lag behind other OSs in speed.