Hello all,

 

Am looking to buy a new PC in the next few months and would like to get an AMD XP Athlon model but the MHz ratings are very confusing (and so far nobody has been able to give me a difinitive answer).

 

Can someone tell me what the Pentium MHz equivalents are of the following AMD Athlon chips:

 

3200

3000

2800+

2600+

2400+

 

I've been told that the 2400+ is the equivalent of 2.0MHz P4 but due to the architecture it should be faster ... Not sure how that works ...

 

Thanks for any feedback!

 

Regards,

The 2400+ bit means it is comparable to a 2400Mhz Intel CPU (but the chip runs a 2000MHz).

 

They are worded so you can make a direct comparison.

 

The same goes for any other Number+, its the equivalent Pentium Speed.

 

Mike

Yup.

 

For example a 1600XP+ Athlon runs at 1.4Ghz and is the equilavent to a Pentium running at 1.6Ghz.

then on top of that youve got the new Barton core xp cpus with more onboard cache memory 512k instead of 256 and a diferent mhz rating as well.

 

for example a xp 2500 barton core runs at 1833 mhz

which is a slower clock speed than say a 2400 (thoroughbred) that runs at 2000

 

but they use 166 front side bus as opposed to thorobreds and the increased cache memory improves repetive instruction operation. so they get a higher xp rating. but they can prove slower in some apps such as video encoding and gaming where instructions are constantly changing

 

just get the fastest you can afford and u cant really go wrong, for normal windows apps a xp2200 should suffice, only go for higher ratings if your doing anything cpu intensive

And if your clocking a 2500 barton from CPU city will hit 3200 barton speeds.

I have a Barton 2800 which runs at 2.08ghz and 512mb of 333Mhz memory. My dad has a Intel P4 2.7Ghz running at 2.7Ghz and 1Gb of333Mhz memory. Running hard CPU tests between the 2 computers my AMD out performed the Intel by quite a bit.

 

Computers can only do 1 thing at once. Forget what people say it can only do 1 thing at once but does it so fast you cant tell. Inside a computer chip are instructions, very simple ones. Some chips have more instructions than others. The computer does what we ask of the computer by using a mixture of these instructions. For example (this is a very general example) asking the computer to work out the area of a circle using Pi r 2.

 

Lets say chip 1 can do 9 calcualtions a second (I know very slow but its just to explain) but needs to do 40 caclulations to work out the answer.

 

Chip 2 can do 6 calculations but has special instructions and can work out the answer in 25 instructions.

 

Chip 1 will take 4.4 seconds to get the answer and chip 2 will take 4.1 second.

 

Disite chip 1 being quicker chip 2 got your answer 0.3 seconds faster. When you consider working a database will consist of tens of thousands of calcualtions the 0.3 x a few 10,000s it all adds up.

 

Also AMD XP are called XP because they are designed to work faster with win XP because Microsoft implimented the use of the XP instriction set in to the OS.

 

Stuart

Thanks a million for your explanations, guys! :D That clears it up once and for all. Like you say, I don't require anything more CPU intensive than the occassional MS FlightSim (to keep my piloting skills honed before I get my PPL), so will go for a reasonable speed.

 

Thanks again!

If you want really strange, the NEW AMD only run at 1.4Ghz and piss all over the perfomance of a Intel 3.2Ghz. :confused:

Originally posted by Danny

Thanks a million for your explanations, guys! :D That clears it up once and for all. Like you say, I don't require anything more CPU intensive than the occassional MS FlightSim (to keep my piloting skills honed before I get my PPL), so will go for a reasonable speed.

 

Thanks again!

 

 

Flight Sim does take a lot out of the CPU though, but the good thing about games and such you can turn down the detail of the graphics which easys off the CPU.

 

Stuart