Which would be better

I'm planning on picking up either an XP 1700 DLT3C TBred B or an XP 2500 Barton. I know the 1700 is an excellent overclocker, and the 2500 is also pretty good. I'm not looking for raw clock speed, but rather overall performance. The barton has more L2 cache, correct? Would that benefit me more than the few extra MHz the 1700 can pump out?

My vote goes to the Barton.

The barton did not show a big boost with the extra cache. It helps alittle, but barely in most cases. If your pressed for money, go for the 1700+. I think in the end, both will perform almost the same, with the barton taking the lead in only specific aplications. That is assuming the clock speeds are around the same.

Somebody said 2.3 GHz 2500+ = 2.4 GHz 1700+.

(Double cache = 100 MHz)

i've had this problem before, it seems that a AMD barton 2500+ does not go 2.5GHz, its real speed is only ~2.0, but in another thread i heard was that AMD performs 128% better then intel Pentium 4's, so to compare AMD to Intel would be times AMD's real speed by 1.28 which would make a AMD BARTON 2500+ be ~2.3, which is where c627627 gets it, except you gotta think that this is just regular ATHOLON XP, and since BARton is a better the a regular XP, the real speed is proabllay ~2.4-2.5, and you could overclcok that by just changing the FSB, so i would defintly get the BARTON 2500+

The new Xp2500+'s are overclocking around the same ram clock speed as the Xp1700+'s from what ive seen. Granted the extra cache is suppose to be worth 100Mhz leaves the barton slightly on top.

Am a barton fan anyway!

since the XP1700 generally will give you an xtra 100mhz (no guarantee could be more or less depending on which two chips) it benches about the same as the 2500 and it is cheaper therefore I recommend the 1700 DLT3C.