AMD Athlon XP2500 Barton - Reliable, Inexpensive and a Good Overclocker
Written: Nov 14 '03 (Updated Dec 03 '03)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Low price comparing with P4, stable performance, good overclocker, easy to install
Cons: Not the fastest processor
The Bottom Line: The Athlon XP2500 Barton is a great value, stable performer and a good overclocker. I highly recommend it, unless you need extreme performance.
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| dkozin's Full Review: AMD Athlon XP 2500+, 1.83 GHz (AXDA2500BOX) Retail... |
I purchased the AMD Athlon XP2500 Barton Retail to use it in a new computer I was building. It is based on the Biostar M7NCD-Pro motherboard and was combined with Kingston 512Mb DDR333 (PC2700) RAM.
Packaging
The retail-packaged processor came with the 3 year warranty and the AMD-labeled heatsink and fan. The heatsink is made of aluminum with the copper center covered with a layer of a silverish thermal compound.
The package also includes detailed installation instructions with pictures in several languages. I was able to install the processor and heatsink in a matter of minutes, even though the heatsink installation requires a slat screwdriver nowadays. The processor pins aligned with the socket perfectly.
Some Specs
The processor has Barton core and runs at 166 x 11 = 1,833 MHz. The FSB runs at 333 MHz. It has 512 Kb L2 cache (unlike the Thoroughbreds and previous cores that only had 256 Kb). The XP2500 labeling means it is supposed to run with the same performance as Intel’s P4 at 2.5 GHz.
It is a good question if it really does and if it does, in which applications, but it is irrelevant to me for several reasons.
1. P4 is much more expensive
2. Motherboards for P4 are more expensive
3. I don’t play games
4. I intended to overclock the processor
Overclocking
I was easily able to overclock the XP2500 up to 166 x 12.5 = 2,083 Hz (XP2800 equivalent). The multiplifier of 12.5 is as far as my motherboard goes and it is enough for me – I don’t intend to risk stability of the system for getting further marginal improvements. I don’t want to tweak the FSB either.
The overclocked processor runs stably as was proven by compressing a set of files (600 Mb) with WinRar. The temperature rose from 40C to 50C (with the stock heatsink/fan), but the processor ran stable.
Configuration
I run the processor at 2,083 Hz instead of 1,833 and run my 512 Mb of Kingston RAM at stock frequency (DDR333) but with aggressive timings (e.g. CL2.0 instead of CL2.5), use Maxtor ATA133 120Gb HDD with 8Mb cache and SIS315 AGP video card.
Performance
In this configuration, the Windows 2000 installation took significantly less time than on my previous computer (Athlon 1.1GHz, PC100 SDRAM). The MS Office 2000 installation was blindingly fast. The office applications (including MS Money 2003 Deluxe) run much faster.
The video playback of AVI and MPEG is smoother and supports full-screen mode with excellent picture quality and no jerky motion. And the copying of 50 Gb of files from one hard drive (FAT32) to the other one (NTFS) took less than 8 minutes.
Conclusion
The Athlon XP2500 Barton is a great value, stable performer and a good overclocker. I highly recommend it, unless you need extreme performance.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
dkozin
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Location: California
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I love to push buttons on electronic (audio and video) equipment. It makes me happy.
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