AMD Processor Upgrade (Advice Needed)

[JanusX]

I want to do a cheap upgrade for my 1.4 T-bird athlon but I need help deciding what would be the best value for my money.

I'm using an ASUS A7A266 mb which as the name suggests uses 133/266 fsb.

Now here are my questions:
One of my choices would be to upgrade to the (or around the) 2400+ which runs at 266fsb.
My other chocie would be alot more expensive would be to get a 2500+ barton which i know would be a nice over clocker, the expensive part is I'd have to upgrade my mboard and ram (if it requires faster than PC2100)

So my questions are
1. Do you think the Barton core would work on my motherboard (I've emailed asus but haven't recieved a response yet)
2. How well does the 2400+ overclock.
3. What is the difference between the thorton, thouroughbred, and any other 266fsb athlons?

Thanks for your help

[Clements]

I *THINK* the 2500+ Bartons need a minimum of DDR333 Memory to work with the 333MHz FSB. My motherboard I currently have does not support this type of memory or the Barton processors, so I'm forced to upgrade to one that does, as well as forking out for even more memory for the extra FSB (otherwise having a Barton with 266 FSB is pointless). This is all mega-expensive... You are in a similar boat to me in actual fact.

So if you don't want to pay something like £300 for all these parts, you could get a 2400+ or 2600+ and not need any other crap and save yourself lots of money, but the o/c prospects of the 2500+ are very good apparently... dunno about the 2400+.

[n_w95482]

I think the Thorton is just an Barton with half the L2 cache (256k instead of 512k). Assuming you can get an unlocked processor I would assume that the 2400+ would overclock decently. You also could get an unlocked 1700+ or 1800+ and overclock that a good amount (felinusz has his 1800+ running at over 2.6 GHz). As for the differences between the Thorton and the T-Bred, I don't know .

[bahamut_2006]

Yeah IIRC all Bartons need a mobo that supports DDR 333. Since yours does not, you can get a Throughbred core one like [Clements] suggested.

[JAZ]

I would wait and save some money to upgrade your cpu/mem/board at the same time.
If you buy the 2400+ then you cant really oc the fsb much on your board due to the limitation of your board and ram, how high a multiplier does your board support?
I dont think your board will support a xp2400+ and unless it supports over a 14x multi then you cant really oc much anyway, if you can stretch to it buy an n-force2, an xp2500 and some ddr400 memory and your pretty much guaranteed to be able to change it to 11x200 which is the same as a xp3200+.
It isnt as expensive as you would think, heres a good cheap example -

AMD Athlon "Barton" XP2500+ 333FSB (Socket A) CPU - OEM (CP-039-AM) 1
£57.00 £57.00
Adata 512MB DDR PC3200 CAS 2.5 (MY-003-AD) 1
£49.00 £49.00
Abit NF7 v2.0 nForce2 (Socket A) Motherboard (MB-035-AB) 1
£47.50 £47.50
Subtotal £153.50
VAT £26.87
Total £180.37