Mobile Barton questions...

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Beyonder
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Mobile Barton questions...

Post by Beyonder » Mon Oct 11, 2004 1:50 pm

So, the time has finally come to upgrade, and I have a few questions surrounding the mobile Barton 2500 core:

1. Before I even continue, is there any other chip I should consider for less than $100? To me, it looks like the optimal balance between performance, heat, and price--but perhaps I've overlooked something.

2. What's a good motherboard? I don't care about onboard sound, video, lan, etc--just stability, no fan on northbridge, less than $100, and plenty of undervolting possibilities.

3. What memory should I get? I'm a bit behind the times as I've been in programmer seclusion for the last ten months--does it depend upon what motherboard I get?

4. Lastly, what sort of clock speed/core voltage would get me around 20W max thermal output?

silencery
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Post by silencery » Mon Oct 11, 2004 2:08 pm

1. General consensus in the hardware community is that the xp2500 M is the best bang for the buck for Socket 462 at the moment. This all depends on which platform you wanna run on of course.

2. NF7 from Abit seems to be a popular board for undervolting. I've had bad experiences w/ Abit though so I'm running an Asus A7N8X.

3. You'll need at least 3200 DIMMs to clock well for this chip. If you don't plan on running a higher FSB, you can use 2100s (or was it 2700) which is stock. Of course, better timings (lower latency) couldn't hurt either.

4. Can't answer this thoroughly but my xp2500 M runs at 1.575V (can't undervolt an A7N8X w/o hardware mods) with a zalman 7000AlCu at the lowest setting at 48C on load with good ventilation. In a poorly ventilated case it goes up to 54C on load.

Right now, I'm running the CPU on an A7N8X volted at 1.575 and clocked at 12.5 x 200 which yields 2500Mhz. I'm more than happy with it :P

Beyonder
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Post by Beyonder » Mon Oct 11, 2004 2:17 pm

Can you tell me a bit more about the negative experience you had with the Abit motherboards? Thanks

Jordan
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Post by Jordan » Mon Oct 11, 2004 2:21 pm

I love my DFI Infinity. It has every overclocking feature in the book which obviously also applies when underclocking. It goes right down to 1.1VCore. The passive HS gets incredibly hot though, but it's completely stable at 440MHz FSB for me.

PC3200 RAM is what you're looking for but if you get higher you can increase the FSB which will help make up for the lower clock speeds. I use PC3500 but the Infinity's FSB is supposed to be able to get past 460 with no problems.

silencery
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Post by silencery » Mon Oct 11, 2004 2:32 pm

The problems I mention go way back starting from the BH6's (anybody remember those!!?) and up... I'm not sure if these problems apply still since Abit has had plenty of time to improve their QC with new designs and better production experience, so you gotta take my words with a grain of salt.

Over the years, my friends and I have built plenty of boxes and have seen quite a few as well. Anyways, we just seem to have bad luck w/ abit since that brand is the only board that ever seems to die over time or cause instability issues such as BSOD or weird kernel problems in various linux distros. Personally, I had two different Abit boards which would consistently fry cards. We were able to narrow the problem down to the boards since none of the other boards exhibited that sort of behavior...

Overall, i would just rather not deal with Abit anymore so I try to stay away.

In response to Jordan, yeah, i hear DFI's doing pretty well w/ their new models. Interestingly, their designer came from Abit... :p

Jan Kivar
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Post by Jan Kivar » Tue Oct 12, 2004 1:12 am

silencery wrote:The problems I mention go way back starting from the BH6's (anybody remember those!!?) and up...
Hey, I'm still using it's bigger brother, BX6. Currently running a Celeron Tualatin 1,3 GHz in it...

Cheers,

Jan

jasoneuc
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Post by jasoneuc » Tue Oct 12, 2004 3:34 am

The Mobile Bartons are great chips. Either the 2500 or 2600 would do nicely at undervolting or O/Cing if you want to alternate. I have a standard 2600 and I'm slightly overclocking it at 172 MHz FSB, but undervolting to 1.45v. Fantastic performance and able to be quieted down nicely with an ALX-800 and Panaflo 80L.

Also, I second the recommendation for the DFI board. I have the LanParty, which is basically a fancier package Infinity but either would be my selection for an A-XP board. Another nice thing about the DFI boards is the ability to store multiple BIOS settings which makes switching from silent to superfast operation as complicated as a reboot and twist of some fan controller knobs.

Only downside to the A-XP Bartons is that they're not A64's...

- Jason

Jordan
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Post by Jordan » Tue Oct 12, 2004 5:32 am

"Another nice thing about the DFI boards is the ability to store multiple BIOS settings which makes switching from silent to superfast operation as complicated as a reboot and twist of some fan controller knobs. "

Oh yeah how could I forget CMOS Reloaded! Yeah it lets you save profiles of different BIOS settings. I have silent mode (1.45V @ 1.82GHz 215FSB x 8.5 multi ) and performance mode (1.65V @ 2.37GHz 215FSB x 11 Multi). Like Jason said, I just turn up the Zalman and 2 Nexus case fans via the Aksa fan controller.

pod03
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Post by pod03 » Tue Oct 12, 2004 5:41 am

I have had no problems with my Abit NF7-s. See http://www.silentpcreview.com/article164-page1.html for what I managed to do with mine. The NF7-s is a pretty mature board now, so I suspect there will be few problems. Also search for my user name (pod03) in the forums for related topics on undervolting, HSF, etc.

If I was to buy now I would probably get an NF7-s and a mobile barton.

I can go from 300MHz to 2000MHz with a reboot, a few changes in bios and no knob twiddling.

Mark

ilancas
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Post by ilancas » Tue Oct 12, 2004 6:26 am

If you are prepared to overclock.....

...wait a couple of weeks and buy the new Sempron 3100+ CPU (should be around USD100). Apparently it will overclock to at least 2.5GHz 8) with stock cooling and decent memory. Should be a good match for the new DFI UT nF3 250Gb mobo.

Socket A will leave you no future upgrade path, whilst Socket 939 is still a bit expensive. This Sempron is socket 754, which is being transformed into AMD's value line.

silencery
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Post by silencery » Tue Oct 12, 2004 1:05 pm

Actually, my mobile xp is running at 2.5GHz right now, and it seems most people have been getting similar results. 1.575 is the lowest voltage my mobo will do unfortunately, but i believe if i could undervolt, it would still be just as stable.

Fat Bunny
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Post by Fat Bunny » Tue Oct 12, 2004 5:30 pm

The XP2500 M is a great chip, very versatile. I have run mine at stock MHz and 1.325V with good stability. I don't know about the 20W thermal output, there are CPU power output calculators out there (try the links page) but the lowest any BIOS I have heard of will go down to is 1.1V. There is a thread on this somewhere but I haven't had time to search.

The few things I would watch out for are proximity fo the socket to the edge of the motherboard. In every dual channel memory board I have seen the socket is close enough to the edge that my Zalman 7000 HSF and E4252 case would not work. If your shooting for 20W though I doubt you really need the extra 3-5% (?) performance dual channel buys you.
silencery wrote: I've had bad experiences w/ Abit though so I'm running an Asus A7N8X.
I've had just the opposite my A7V8X was stuck at 1.75V and had a broken AGP 8X implementation. My Abit board is not anthing fancy but has more consistent BIOS updates to introduce new CPUs etc. than the ASUS one ever did.

In summary with this CPU you might not get down to 20W but there are enough good HSF combinations out there that with a fanmate and an inline resistor together you should be able to get an inaudible setup. As I write this my zalman fan is inaudible at 1200 RPM and I am running at 2106 MHZ , folding and getting 51C off the CPU diode.

One day I'll catch up with that 2.5Ghz but for now my PWM temperatures are a limiting factor. Image

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Post by Tigr » Wed Oct 13, 2004 5:29 am

I have now 2 machines running with Athlon XP-M 2600.

First runs at 1 GHz : 200 FSB x 5. This one is passively cooled and is on 24x7 as my main machine for everything. CPU is undervolted to 1.1 V. The motherboard is Abit NF7-S.

Second runs at 2.5 GHz : 200 FSB x 12.5. This one is slightly overvolted, to 1.6 V IIRC. The motherboard is Asus A7N8X, I think.

No problems, no complaints. I would recommend Abit any time, although you need to replace the heatsink on the northbridge yourself to get it quiet.

Memory: just get decent PC3200 from the likes of Corsair, Crucial or any other famous. I run the "value" priced sticks from Crucial - they work fine. The only memory I ever had problems with was from Twinmos.

Old Dude
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Post by Old Dude » Wed Oct 13, 2004 9:06 am

Maybe you should also check Soltek 75FRN2-L nforce2 motherboard. You can drop the Vcore to 1.1 V and monitor the CPU temperature from it's thermal diode. A rare combination as far as I know.

Pjotor
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Post by Pjotor » Wed Oct 13, 2004 9:14 am

Tigr wrote:Second runs at 2.5 GHz : 200 FSB x 12.5. This one is slightly overvolted, to 1.6 V IIRC. The motherboard is Asus A7N8X, I think.
Tigr, have you tested your rig for stability, and if you have it, how? I have an OC'd xp2500+ @ 2.4 GHz on which Prime95 fails rather quickly unless I up the Vcore to about 1.8 V (even though it's not unstable in other applications).

Tigr
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Post by Tigr » Wed Oct 13, 2004 10:07 am

Pjotor wrote:
Tigr wrote:Second runs at 2.5 GHz : 200 FSB x 12.5. This one is slightly overvolted, to 1.6 V IIRC. The motherboard is Asus A7N8X, I think.
Tigr, have you tested your rig for stability, and if you have it, how? I have an OC'd xp2500+ @ 2.4 GHz on which Prime95 fails rather quickly unless I up the Vcore to about 1.8 V (even though it's not unstable in other applications).
Mine is a XP-M 2600, so it is rated for slightly higher frequency. I checked it out now and I have it running currently at 2.4 GHz, i.e. 200x12 with Vcore of 1.65V. But I did run it at 2.5 GHz some time ago albeit with a higher Vcore. I did not want to keep it running that fast because it got hot, I am more comfortable with it as it is now.

Anyway, I tested it as follows: first a couple of rounds of memtest, then Prime95 for a few hours.

Beyonder
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Post by Beyonder » Thu Oct 14, 2004 11:59 am

Thanks for the responses, everyone! It's a big help.


I've also been looking at a Pentium-III @ 1.15 ghz because they're only $44 at newegg right now and I could reuse old memory, but the quest for a motherboard has proved to be a daunting task. If anyone knows of somewhere to buy a tualatin compatible motherboard that undervolts, do share. ;) There's two socket 370 motherboards on newegg, but I don't know if either of them undervolt, and they look sort of sketchy. :cry:


Any other good motherboards other than the Abit, Asus, and Soltek mentioned previously that are worth looking at? Again, with a preference towards undervolting?

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