Processor for an email/web machine?

Ah well i was planning on building a web/emailing machine (with some light Sims gaming) for my sister and mother and i come to find that my old, trust Athlon 1400Tbird is chipped... it's a mother of a chip too, along the short edge of the core is a chunk out as long as 1/3 of that edge! Anyway, i'm needing a replacement for this and a good, and cheap mobo for this system.

I was thinking either the Duron 1.3ghz or an Athlon XP 1700+. Whichever one runs cooler would be my choice as this case will have no extra case ventilation (probably). But hey, there may be more bang-for-buck out there perhaps in the tualatin area or somewheres.

TIA, Chowdy.

I would definately go with the 1700+ tbredb for bang for buck. Also people have run this chip at stock speeds as low as 1.1V.

Currently I have no AC and it is 90* outside and I have my chip overclocked to 1.85ghz with 1.6V and the temp is 48C with my fan running at 7V.

In an airconditioned environment this chip will run fine at stock speeds with a cheapy heatsink (prolly even the amd retail one), especially if you undervolt it. Also the Duron 1.3 is still ceramic based and will definately put out more heat.

Tualatins are real nice for low heat but they are a little expensive for performance given. My 1.1a ran at stock speed at 1.2 Volts with a Pentium 1 heatsink with no case fans the higest the temp went was 37C.

The advantage of the Athlon though is that if you get say a K7S5A when you feel like it you could throw in some ddr and a faster cpu and have a pretty decent system. The tualatin upgrade path is pretty much dead.

For Quarter 4 of 2003: email & web can be done for well under $50 with one of these:
http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/cpu/display/20030826071248.html

but for

September 2003: For entry level or for advanced use:
Cheapest guaranteed T-Bred B $49
http://www.gameve.com/store/gameve_viewitem.asp?idproduct=267

This is because with a SK6+ Thermalright for $10 or so (or go for the better $15.99 SK-7) you can OC sky high.
http://www.svcompucycle.com/thersk7socco.html

Pretty much any 80x25mm will do with SK-7 or another one for SK6+.

Look for directions on how to apply thermal paste (it comes with sk-7) but this is a good one:
http://www.arcticsilver.com/arctic_alumina_instructions.htm
http://www.arcticsilver.com/ceramique_instructions.htm

look for an old school via C3 (actually, i had one a month ago, but threw it away). i pretty sure those can be cooled passively

You could go real cheap and buy a Duron/mobo combo for less than $100 with onboard vid/sound/lan.... the sims can run on a 2MB PCI vid card.... I tried! It worked fine. For this situation. power is not an issue, nor is good graphics speed.

1700+ tbredB and ECS k7s5a for a cheap system (k7s5a supports SDR and DDR I believe)

AMD_Me said:

1700+ tbredB and ECS k7s5a for a cheap system (k7s5a supports SDR and DDR I believe)

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You are correct sir.

look for an old school via C3 (actually, i had one a month ago, but threw it away). i pretty sure those can be cooled passively

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yes but these have trouble playing a simple video let alone playing the sims.

The 1700+ T-Bred B suggested above is a great choice for that rig. It will run Windows with e-mail and web smoothly while playing your sims fine without no expensive video card.

You could really passively cool the T-Bred as well.

seiferoth10 said:

look for an old school via C3 (actually, i had one a month ago, but threw it away). i pretty sure those can be cooled passively

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That is a great solution for basic email/web surfing machine, but he also said that he would like to play some sims or other light games. Unfortunately the sims is a muther of a game as far as cpu and graphics card goes and the comp will need more poop to run that game at reasonable framerates. A duron 1 gig or better or a Celeron 1 gig or better with at least 256mb or ram would be a much better option for light gaming. A Celeron would be a great cpu if you are really looking to keep temps down in a stuffy case with no ventilation. If you can find a psu with the vents situated right above the cpu to exhaust the heat well then a Duron or even a tbird would work ok too. I just set up a system for my inlaws in a stuffy case with no spot in the rear and with a standard psu and only the one fan in the front bringing cool air in the cpu overheated after about 20 minutes of just being idle. But then I found a psu with the vents that sat right over the cpu and it kept temps in the low 50's even under heavy loads. This was with a 1333 tbird with a stock Athlon XP hsf on it. So with all that said, a tbird setup or even an Athlon XP setup with some ddr would be your best bet if you think that you can keep it cool, but if you are really doubting it then shop these forums for a PIII and either a Tualatin cpu or a PIII 1 gig or Celeron 1 gig since they run cool even in a stuffy case. Just make sure that you have at least 256mb of memory and at least a GF2 MX400 and you should have a pretty descent web browsing and email comp that can at least play the SIMS. Good luck man.

Just email and web stuff? What about an old k62 system? Those would be fine, and cheap as hell.

Yodums said:

You could really passively cool the T-Bred as well.

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Have you done this with success? What kind of case ventilation did you have, and at what voltage? I tried passively cooling an underclocked low end duron outside of the case with a glaciator II and it would always eventually overheat.

teh problem with the Durons are that they were ceramic and retained heat like anything

funnyperson1 said:

teh problem with the Durons are that they were ceramic and retained heat like anything

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I suppose that's true. Still made me a little gun shy to try it with anything faster.

Were all of the tbred-b's that you say people have run at 1.1 volts dlt3c's ? Or do I have a chance of getting that kind of low voltage out of a dut3c?

funnyperson1 said:

Tualatins are real nice for low heat but they are a little expensive for performance given. My 1.1a ran at stock speed at 1.2 Volts with a Pentium 1 heatsink with no case fans the higest the temp went was 37C.

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I personally prefer Tualaltin Celerons, good overclocking headroom on the FSB, and I don't see the point the extra cache on the server chips. The tualatin celerons have the same amount of cache as the non-smp tualatin p3s. Also those tualatin celerons run COOOOOL. They are good competition with the VIA C3, my via runs at like 25C and my tualatins run at like 32C. Also when you realize that the Via C3 is a hyperclocked cyrix chip running on the GTL bus, you suddenly want the tualatin. I have a sneeking suspision that you can run the tualatins without a heatsink becasue of that IHS, like you could with the p2s. My thin fin alluminum heatsinks are always COLD to the touch, it really freaks me out even though I am running prime95 in the background.

****EDIT****

Also the tualatin celerons are a good deal, they are only $39 (1.3 ghz) bucks on pricewatch, I got 5 for my rendaring rigs, while a 1.26ghz p3 is $163 and the 1.4 ghz is $208 . So a Tualatin celeron or tualeron is a really good deal, also thermallly it is better than a duron at the same price, only problem with it is the non-ddr cpu bus. Also what is the point of getting those 386 cpu core based C3s when tualatin is almost the same temps, at stock voltage.

Also if you are really looking for a cool looking e-mail/web access terminal check out the i-opener, yes it is really old and uses the super socket 7 (100mhz) bus and has emmbeded video, and it's os is a proprietory emmbeded unix on a flash chip. But it just looks cool becasue it is a all-in-one. It used to becalled some years ago the $99 computer because the company that made it expected you to use their ISP service ($24.95). The company that made the i-opener went bankrupt like most of the other .coms. THe price for a unit is between $20 and $50 on ebay fro a unhacked unit. A used unit that was connected to the phone line will have a patch that allows it to use any ISP that the .com manufacturer released to all the units when they went bankrupt. A virgin unit will never have that patch plus the phoneline for getting it is down now, so a virgin unit must be hacked. To hack the unit to use a regular OS will take some skill, mostly cutting sheetmetal with tin snips and not screwing up with plugging a HD in. I have one hacked to run at 550mhz with a k6-2+ inside, I also have another one waiting for me to have the time to do it. Here is a picture of the unit, this isn't my picture, it is from a i-opener fan site called linux-hacker.net.



EDIT:
Also this unit is a LCD pannel with a motherboard on the back, the whole unit is under a inch thick.

bulk88 said:

I personally prefer Tualaltin Celerons, good overclocking headroom on the FSB, and I don't see the point the extra cache on the server chips. The tualatin celerons have the same amount of cache as the non-smp tualatin p3s. Also those tualatin celerons run COOOOOL. They are good competition with the VIA C3, my via runs at like 25C and my tualatins run at like 32C. Also when you realize that the Via C3 is a hyperclocked cyrix chip running on the GTL bus, you suddenly want the tualatin. I have a sneeking suspision that you can run the tualatins without a heatsink becasue of that IHS, like you could with the p2s. My thin fin alluminum heatsinks are always COLD to the touch, it really freaks me out even though I am running prime95 in the background.

****EDIT****

Also the tualatin celerons are a good deal, they are only $39 (1.3 ghz) bucks on pricewatch, I got 5 for my rendaring rigs, while a 1.26ghz p3 is $163 and the 1.4 ghz is $208 . So a Tualatin celeron or tualeron is a really good deal, also thermallly it is better than a duron at the same price, only problem with it is the non-ddr cpu bus. Also what is the point of getting those 386 cpu core based C3s when tualatin is almost the same temps, at stock voltage.

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I was talking about the celerons, 39$ is a good price, but the tualatin mobos are all around 80-100$ and that doesn't include ddr support.

THe AthlonXP route is better because DDR and better motherboards are always available.

For the price of a ST6 or TUSL2-C one could get an nforce2 board and 256mb DDR 2100.

funnyperson1 said:

I was talking about the celerons, 39$ is a good price, but the tualatin mobos are all around 80-100$ and that doesn't include ddr support.

THe AthlonXP route is better because DDR and better motherboards are always available.

For the price of a ST6 or TUSL2-C one could get an nforce2 board and 256mb DDR 2100.

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Yea.. athlon 1700+ would be MUCH better... MUCH better performance than a Cerelon (YUCK!) and only $42 from newegg.. It may be an "a" but its only for e-mail and light gaming Still does its job exceptionally well....

dippy_skoodlez said:

Yea.. athlon 1700+ would be MUCH better... MUCH better performance than a Cerelon (YUCK!) and only $42 from newegg.. It may be an "a" but its only for e-mail and light gaming Still does its job exceptionally well....

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Now now, the tualatin celerons were formidable in their time, its just that the PIII platform is now 5 years old.

At newegg.com there's a Biostar motherboard on sale that uses the Nforce2 ultra 400 chipset. it has onboard sound and onboard lan and looks perfect for what they're going to do. Also, the video is my old Geforce4ti4200, so it'd make a good comp that my friends could come over and enjoy some LANage on (when my parents and sister aren't on it, of course ). Somehow, the gf4 works even after i thought it got totally messed up after the fan failed (weird).

So here's the linky to the mobo http://www.newegg.com/app/Viewprodu...ription=N82E16813138227&searchdepa=0&srchFor=

and the 1700+ from the same vendor http://www.newegg.com/app/viewproduct.asp?DEPA=&submit=Go&description=N82E16819103352

I was talking about the celerons, 39$ is a good price, but the tualatin mobos are all around 80-100$ and that doesn't include ddr support.

THe AthlonXP route is better because DDR and better motherboards are always available.

For the price of a ST6 or TUSL2-C one could get an nforce2 board and 256mb DDR 2100.

Click to expand...

that's not totally true...

you can get a soyo TISU with great overclocking options for $55...from www.mwave.com

i have it...

the performance of my 1.0 at 1.62ghz is on par with a non-overclocked 1700+....

not bad for $100 total (free RAM at officemax pc133...)

now that is cheap...