Athlon XP, 333FSB

[mrtristan]

Has anyone built a rig with the new 333FSB Athlon XP chips? I'm curious about encoding times. From what I understand, the P4's main advantage over the Athlons is it's higher FSB speed. Now that AMD is somewhat catching up, I wonder if the new 333FSB chips can compete with the P4s.

If anyone has a link to some encoding information that's relative to the new AMD chips, I would appreciate it.

Feel free to share your expertise, as well. I know that some of you are much more versed than me, regarding technical issues.

[Craig Tucker]

I have been thinking the same thing mrtristan, also does anyone know what motherboards are compatible with these chips I believe it is the XP2700 and the XP2800. I have the Epox 8k3a+ which uses the VIA KT333 chip, but epox states the max fsb as 266MHz, is this board compatible with the new cpu's ?

EPOX 8K3A+

[StudeBarc]

craigtucker,
hmmm...pity about the pricing of the 333mhz FSB XP's but anyway. The Gigabyte GA 7 VAXP (mine) supports the 333 FSB as do the Asus V8X boards too...not sure abot the epox tho...perhaps a bios update???? The real increase comes due to memory bandwidth access....and the ability to make fuller use of DDR above 266mhz. I have seen reviews on XP2600+, 2700+, 2800+ with 333mhz internal clocks and they look pretty darn nice. Just have to wait until they are a realistic price. P4's are nice too but damn they are expensive....especially here in Oz.
Cheers,
Studebarc 8)

[Craig Tucker]

I emailed epox, they replied with this link.

http://www.epox.org/temp_cgi/viewnews.cgi?searchxp2800

[Faustus]

Yeah I just found out that my Soyo Dragon KT333 does NOT support them... only the Dragon KT400 does.... doh! So the board that came out 2 weeks AFTER I built my computer is the one I wanted...sheesh.

The chips are so expensive that the upgrade will have to wait a while anyhow, and my 2200 is cutting it for now...

[mrtristan]

I did some poking around and found a good link. Unfortunately, I didn't save it, so no linkage this time around. In short, the 333 XPs did outperform their counterparts in most tests. The 2700 was also slightly faster than the 2.8 P4. This is a summarization of a lot of standard benchmarks, so I'm assuming that the real world difference will also be significant.

Anyway the article mentioned that some of the 333 boards can support the faster bus speed, but they don't officially declare it.

As for pricing, the 2600 with the 333FSB is priced the same as the 2600 with the 266FSB.

According to the review, the architecture of the 333 chips is also supposed to be tweaked a little, adding a small margin of processing power. Also, as StudeBarc mentioned, the 333 XPs can make much better use of memory bandwith.

Found the article.

Edit: I'm thinking of building my new system based on the 333 chip, instead of a dual. I know it still won't be as fast as a dual CPU setup, but it will be much cheaper.