[sithpigeon]

I currently have an amd athlon (original) processor installed onto a desktop computer. I would like to get a better processor without upgrading the motherboard. As far as I can tell the AMD Athlon XP would be the right choice. Any advice on this?

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The Athlon XP may be better than the original Athlon but whether its a worthwhile upgrade depends entirely on what you've got now and what you want to replace it with. This technology is five or six years old now so a processor upgrade may not be worth it when you consider you can replace a board, memory and processor for half as much again and get far better performance out of that than spending money on something that's six years old.

[Neil Jones]

The Athlon XP may be better than the original Athlon but whether its a worthwhile upgrade depends entirely on what you've got now and what you want to replace it with. This technology is five or six years old now so a processor upgrade may not be worth it when you consider you can replace a board, memory and processor for half as much again and get far better performance out of that than spending money on something that's six years old.

[sithpigeon]

So what your saying is it's cheaper to get a new motherboard, or better. I currently have the first amd athlon processor make (think it might be K7?) on a amd 761 board, I have 1 gig of ram and an nvidia geforce 2 gts graphics card. I think I can get the processor for like thirty bucks which seems pretty cheap and I thought it was supposed to be the same tech level as pentium 4. I think it's a good deal since I don't have much to spend.

[amw_drizz]

if you have the extra money upgrade the system completely new mobo / ram / what not a decent system could double the speed of your current system for a cheap as 500$.

What speed is your current CPU?

[BravoZulu]

For what it's worth you can easily nab a newer gen single core (sometimes a 3800+ dual core) AMD CPU on FSFT forums for around $25.00 to $45.00. Lots of people dumping older K8 939 setups in forums that are very affordable. This would be so much faster than a year-1999-2001 model AMD setup. Moreover you can get a CPU/Mobo combo at a Fry's electronics pretty cheap these days.