Introduction

The budget system market has become one of the largest segments of home desktop PC sales over the years. This market is dominated by the Intel Celeron, but thanks to the advances in technology and competition, budget processors are now showing a lot of potential. Intel still relies upon its Celeron line of processors while AMD tends to use its lower end Athlon processors. With AMD moving away from the 32-bit processors and looking ahead to its 64-bit processors, the Athlon XP line of processors are reaching their end of life.

The Athlon XP 2500+ is the lowest grade of Barton processor. The main addition of the Barton chip design is the inclusion of 512 KB of level 2 cache over the previous 256 KB. This provides a significant boost in certain applications that are very reliant upon cache. The increased size of the die caused AMD to actually reduce the clock speeds of the processors. Their latest XP 3200+ uses a 400 MHz bus speed, but the previous 2500+, 2800+ and 3000+ processors still use a 333 MHz bus speed. The XP 2500+ has dropped dramatically in price recently and can now be found for at or below $100 making it a perfect budget priced processor.

Packaging and Specifications

The retail package of the Athlon XP 2500+ includes both the processor and the manufacturer standard heatsink. The AMD approved heatsink leaves much to be desired and many users have opted to replace it by after market units. Its construction is of aluminum instead of the preferred copper and has a loud high-speed 60mm fan. The thermal conductor between the processor and the heatsink is a simple thermal pad. Also included are a color fold out installation instruction and an AMD Athlon XP case badge sticker.

AMD Athlon Retail Kit Aluminum Heatsink

The specification of the XP 2500+ are:

Benchmarks

For benchmarking the CPU the following hardware and software was used:

For testing of the straight CPU power, I used both the PCMark2002 and SiSoft Sandra tools for testing. In addition to the CPU results, I've also included the memory scores for reference. For comparison, some of the scores from my review of the Shuttle SB51G XPC with a Pentium 4 2.4 GHz processor are used.

Overall the scores of the XP 2500+ put it very close to the 2.4 GHz Pentium 4. Since the XP 2500+ costs less than the Pentium 4 processor, it makes for a very attractive purchase. Of course Intel has released the newer Pentium 4 2.4 GHz with an 800 MHz bus that uses DDR400 memory. While that processor is faster than both of these for general purpose and memory, it does cost over twice as much as the XP 2500+.

Overclocking

OK, here is the part that makes the XP 2500+ really stand out. The Athlon XP 2500+ is not clock locked in any way. This allows easy adjustments of both the frontside bus and the multiplier with a suitable motherboard. The ASUS A7N8X Deluxe is a very highly rated motherboard with a very good track record for overclocking. To ensure that the processor wouldn't have problems with overheating, the high-performance Thermalright SLK-800U was chosen along with a middle range fan to provide good performance without the extreme noise. Of course the Cosair memory used in the system is also capable of DDR 400 operation which would impose no problems with the memory bus during overclocking.

My goal with overclocking was not to get the most performance possible, but instead to see if it was possible to achieve the same performance levels as a brand new XP 3200+ processor. Since the XP 3200+ uses the same 11x multiplier, it would only be necessary to adjust the frontside bus to the 200 MHz speed. Before I did this, I want to see if the processor could handle the 12.5x multiplier at the 166 MHz bus that would be the equivalent speed of a Athlon XP 2800+ processor. For additional information about overclocking, please reference the "What is Overclocking?" article.

The CPU was able to boot and run all tasks at the 12.5x166 speed of a 2800+ processor without any problems at the standard vCore of 1.65v. The testing of the 11x200 overclocking equivalent to the current 3200+ was able to boot up properly, but the system would periodically hang during testing. Once the vCore of the processor was increase to 1.7v, the system was able to complete all stress tests without problems.

The benchmarks were rerun again at the 12.5x166 and 11x200 settings. Below are the results from the test runs with these settings as well as the stock speed ratings. The numbers in parentheses is the percentage change over the stock speed scores.

Conclusions

What more can be said other than the Athlon XP 2500+ processor is amazing. Its price to performance ration at the stock speeds are fairly impressive. Once overclocked, the processor gains an incredible amount of power for such a low price. AMD must have an incredible fabrication plant that allows for such a low-end processor to be able to reach the same processing power as their top of the line CPU. With just a little bit of tweaking and an investment in a strong air cooling solution, it was possible to get the same performance as the XP 3200+ but at less than 1/3 of the cost! In the end, the AMD Athlon XP 2500+ is an easy recommendation for users who are looking for low cost general use system or even for high performance computing through overclocking.

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