What to buy? Barton or TBred?

Hello

I've suddenly gotten a chance to upgrade my cpu, since I'm going to build a system for my family...

They'll get my Athlon 1.4Ghz, and I'll the cpu of my choosing (within a certani price range)...

My system is:
Asus A7V8X-Gold (onboard LAN and Sound)
256mb PC2700 (soon to be 1GB PC2700 or 512mb PC3200)
Ati Radeon 9700pro
harddrives & such

So the question for me now is:
Which cpu should I get?

I'm torn between the XP2600+ (TBred) and the XP2500+ (Barton)...

I've yet to see much difference between the barton and the tbred in the reviews I've read, but then they only compared a 3000+ barton to a 3.06Ghz...

I wil not overclock it, so how far I can push it won't influence my buying it...


My system is used for: Inet, Programming, Word, Games, Seti@Home and such...

So what would be better?
256kb extra cache? or 250Mhz?

[EDIT]

Fixed the topic from "Baron" to "Barton"

[/EDIT]

Re: What to buy? Barton or TBred?

Well, after a lot of reading I've decided for a boxed Barton 2500+ along with 2x 512MB of TwinMOS PC2700...

It would seem the extra 256k of cache'll give me a nice little increase, compared to the TBred, with games and office apps, though not with mp3 encoding and such...


I think this should give my computer a wee little speed increase compared to my current Athlon 1.4Ghz and 256MB TwinMOS 2700...


I can't wait until the postman gets here!

Just read this now, but I was going to say that if it was me, I would grab a Barton. As you can more than likely run it with a mild overclock to get the 250Mhz that it loses against the Tbred. 1gb of ram... mmmm. I considered getting another 512mb of OCZ PC3500 but I'm working on getting a stable overclock first so a bigger PSU (probably Antec Tru Power) is in order first

Hehehe... It would seem everyone OC's these days...

I think I'll leave it at stock speeds until I actually need that extra performance...

The reason I went with 1GB of PC2700 is that my mobo (A7V8X) doesn't support more than one chip of PC3200, and the price for 1GB was way out of reach...


Arris> How far have you managed to push it so far?

Well I've had it run 3dmark2001SE to completion at 200fsbx10. It warm boots up to 2.2Ghz 11x200fsb but if I try and cold boot it doesn't work. And at 200fsbX10 I get errors in Prime95. The ram should be up to it as its PC3500 and I have talked with others at www.amdforums.com about their OCZ ram and they are running fast CAS2 timings at 200-220Mhz... So I think my PSU is at its limit as I am feeding 2.8v (rather than 2.6v) to the ram and 1.8v to the CPU rather than 1.6v...

I may buy bigger PSU and see if that helps... otherwise it may be the core that is limiting speeds. I also might try reseating the northbridge heatsink with some ASIII to keep the temps more undercontrol (or replace it with an old Pentium heatsink...)