Ah feel the need fer speed

I have an XP1800+ chugging along at 266mhz happily married to 1GB of (Infineon) DDR to match, they live on an nForce2 mobo.

Newegg can sell me a 2400+ for about $70 or a 2500+Barton for about $85
I figure I'll run the memory async (Infineon is a poor OCer) and benefit from the flat out speed and bigger cache of the Barton.

Am I dumb? I know nForces are best run in sync but is it that important? Price difference is minimal and I don't want to do this twice.

Get the barton. There is a performance difference between Sync and Async but you will gain overall performance with the 2500+

Why not just up the barton multiplier to the max?

If you're thinking that you'll LOSE performance by upgrading your processor, NO. Buy the Barton, and live long and prosper.

The 'performance hit' you're talking about is evidenced in direct comparisons between similar systems, one running sync, one running async.

It's not even too terribly big, either. Dont' sweat it.

I personally think you'd gain more of a performance boost if you invested in some better ram. Not to say you wouldnt gain a performance from a faster CPU...obviously you will.

But do not let the extra cache make you change your mind, i've owned both cores and really mhz for mhz i couldnt notice anything...thats the honest truth.

I think you could almost afford a gig of pc3200 from corsair if you used the money your about to spend and sold the other gig of ram you had.

From what i heard, the nforce 2 boards run horribly out of sync, i have never done it but that is what my friend told me. Take it for what it's worth.

Just my 2 cents

-jag

The problem with upgrading my ram is mostly due to the stability of my favorite app.
Imagine if prime 95 had bugs that would crash most computers anyway, now imagine that it had error control to allow you to save your work in many circumstances, now add 10MB files expanded to fill a full GB of ram, all running the CPU at 100% most of the time, except while loading various subroutines every minute or so.
Add that I prefer a silent system. It's in my living room because I don't want to be a hermit, but I don't want to disturb the people around me.

I need 110% stability, every time I try to overclock I get errors within minutes. All other programs will run fine, but this particular one become unusable. It's fine 99% of the time at stock.

I figure I'll switch to faster ram when my wallet approves, but the processor will be a better upgrade at the buck at the moment -- moving from 1800+ to 2500+ will make a bigger difference than any amount of expensive ram will ever make. Besides, ram is pricey right now, this Barton is cheap enough to go dually (hmmmm)

If that memory is two sticks, the dual-channel ability of your mainboard will let you run them async without a noticable loss of performance.