Been looking again at getting another cpu for my system. I had a 2500+ Barton last week along with a Asus A7V8X-X mobo. When put together the system kept on locking up at ramdom intervals Tried diff ram (Crucial 2700), drivers, pci cards even a clean install. which was locking. Dumped my old 1.4 T Bird into the system and the problem went.. (Any Thoughts on this prob?) RMA'd the chip back and now i have the choice of another Barton (Retail) or a ATHLON XP2600+ Thoroughbred OEM Will the barton be faster than the Thoroughbred as the T Bred has a higher core speed. Spec atm is: Asus A7V8X-X 768mb Crucial PC2700 Sonicfury Creative GF4 Ti4400 Enermax PSU 430w TIA..
i personally would go for the barton, as they are pretty good overclockers. will you be overclocking?
I doubt i will be overclocking the cpu, having the trouble with the last barton to run at all was a headache
The couple of MHz in clock difference doesn't outweigh the large improvement you get with the extra L2 cache. And the Barton is a good overclocker if you ever feel like doing that - go with it.
