Help me on this one.

I was planning to get an Athlon XP 2500+ Barton 333mhz bus. I saw a review off one of the new Barton (It was in Maxuim PC). If I got that, 3200 Dual Channel DDR, and overclocked it to 2.0ghz, would it be able to reach near 2.8ghz P4 speeds? Maxium PC's testing showed that the Barton won in half of the tests with a proc exactly the same as the 2500+ with a 1.9 clock speed agianst a 3.06. Will I get these excellent results with ocing my 2500+ to 2ghz?

Yes, you should- although im not sure you have your numbers exactly right.

The 2500s seem to be overclocking to around 2.3Ghz- That should be about equal to an xp3000- not 1.9ghz.

You read that review wrong. The Barton 3000+ is clocked at like 2.167 ghz, and while the Intel chip did win over half of the individual tests, some margins were VERY narrow, and the Barton smoked the HT in some other tests. (SSE2 tests of course went to the HT, but the entire ordeal shows the Barton as a very very very competitive processor overall.)

This was WITH RDRAM 1066 on the HT side, and DDR333 on the Barton side. Imagine that Barton running at 200mhz FSB with sync'd ram and the mild overclock it is EASILY capable of. There would have been no competition. (but then, there would have been no fair competition unless the HT was overclocked as well, but that's another argument.)

Personally, I think a barton core clocked at 2 ghz would beat the tar out of a non-HT 2.8 PIV. The 2.8 would win in SSE2 enabled tasks, and that's probably it. Maybe things that were EXTREMELY memory bandwidth intensive, but the margin wouldn't be extreme.

The thing i like about bartons is the increased memory bandwith with the 512k L2 cache.

check my sig for my barton 2500 results