Pure processing bliss!

Bought a new CPU today – went from a 800 MHz AMD Duron to a 2GHz Athlon XP with a Thoroughbred core. Effectively, that’s tripling the CPU performance (at least), since the L2 cache is quadrupled (from 64KB to 256KB – my motherboard doesn’t support the Barton, so I couldn’t get one with 512KB L2). Also, the process technology went from 0.18 to 0.13μm, allowing for an extra 12.6 million transistors on the wafer, which makes for a total of 37.6 million. Oh yeah – and the front side bus went from 100 to 133MHz.

I flashed my BIOS at the same time, since my current wouldn’t have been able to recognize the 2400+ CPU (though it could have utilized it just fine, so I guess I just want it to look nice during boot ). That in itself can be pure hell for the avid hardware enthusiast, since we all know that if something goes wrong during those few critical seconds while data is being transferred to the CMOS chip, your system is fried. Which means no POST, which means no juice, which means bye-bye motherboard. Mostly, anyways. Add to that notion of absolute horror the fact that I wanted to try out the unofficial ECS overclocking BIOS by Cheepoman, and you’ll see what an agonizing time I’ve been through for this hardware upgrade.

Alas, it all went well, and I’m now able to happily blow away my foes in UT2003 and BF1942: Desert Combat at a steady framerate per second of about 40ish (haven’t really benchmarked yet), even though I still have my trusty old Asus MX440 running the show.

About time I did that, too – my Duron has now been in office for more than 2 years, and its time in the limelight has come and gone (did so already when I bought it, actually). Funny though, I paid almost exactly the same for the Athlon XP as I did back then for the Duron – roughly DKK 600,-.