Is it worth it?

[nukes]

I currently have a 1.1ghz (1@1.1) duron, is it worth the upgrade to a 1700XP? I can't afford to go any higher, but would rather spend the money on another area of the computer if it won't offer much of a performance gain.

[dragonb]

depends on what you are doing...
for gaming, probably not too much of difference, especially if other options are updating vid card..
for photoshop, probably will show a difference..
for encoding divx or something very intensive, then yea, that will make a difference...

What else is in the machine? Maybe we could point out other bottlenecks instead.
dragonb

[nukes]

Just about to upgrade from 256mb pc100 to 512 PC133 (crucial).
The pc is sometimes used for gaming, but the bottleneck there is the graphics card (32mb Radeon SDR)
I am just after a general increase in responsivness, for thigs to happen faster. Unfortunatley I am going to be stuck with a K7S5A on this build so I won't be able to clock it up much. Do you think it would be better just buying a 1.2 or 1.1 duron and a better mobo?
Incidently, what sort of performance do you see in real-world tasks for the 1.1, 1.2 or 1.3 durons?

[dragonb]

I run a 1900+, and on a second machine been running win2k server on a Duron 1.3. For normal tasks, there really isn't that much different. For browsing, office, etc, I really don't notice any difference.

I think the RAM upgrade will help quite a bit. You'll like that, but yea the vidcard is your bottleneck for games.

btw, it's not a great mobo on the duron either. It's a KM266 from MSI, so built in vidcard(which sometimes gets a gef4mx440 put in instead) built in sound, built in lan. Pretty much just a cheap board for the second machine. not familar as much with that mobo..I'll check on it.

when I get the second machine running I'd be happy to run benches on it for your, if interested. Although the DDR helps it quite a bit.
dragonb

[MDS]

why not go with ddr ram instead of the pc133? With an XP you get 266fsb and with a duron you get 200fsb. An XP 1700+ Thoroughbred is only $2 more than the 1.3 duron. The XP1700+ will run ya $51 shipped from newegg and the 1.3 Duron will run ya $49 shipped you figure out which is better.

edit: Also I run alot of the K7S5A mobo's and have great luck with them, they are not good ocer's but are very stable. I run XP1600+,(2) 950 Duron's, XP2400+, and soon a XP2600+ all on K7S5A's with DDR ram except for the XP1600+

[RamonGTP]

Like others have said, it depends on what you're going to be doing with it... I went from a 1.333 tbird to a 1700+ and noticed a nice improvment in games. However stuff like browsing or using any office apps will be un-noticable. Definatly go with DDR if you're going to get the 1700+

[nukes]

Well, I can't afford to go with DDR ram unless I only go with 256mb so I didn't think it would be worth it against double the amount.
Here the prices are:
1.3ghz Duron - £24.40
1.46ghz AthlonXP - £34.50
So I thought it may be better to just go for the athlon because of the 133fsb and increased cache.
This machine will be used for all sorts of things, but the most strain it will be put under is a bit of gaming (GTA3, UT2003, CS), running FaD. Under linux, there is almost always some big makefile running in the background, whilst I work in openoffice/ms office, mozilla, backbox and have a few shells running things.
The reason I am stuck with the K7S5A-L is I couldn't find any good SDR boards for under £60 so just went with this as it includes the sound and lan, and isn't really a bad board.
-edit:
just corrected some typos

[PastranA]

does photoshop take a bit to run dragonb?

[Cody]

Photoshop takes a bit to load, and uses a healthy amount of ram, but I have 512 on a PIII800MHz which isn't a new computer by any means and I don't have any problem running Photoshop 7

Cody