I bought this back two years ago for around £130, back then it was a monster cpu but obviously today, people will say this is no core 2 duo. However this still does hold its place in the market due to the price segment of around £45 now, which is excellent value for money. For someone spending this much on a cpu, its likely they are after a budget dual core system, but any dual core cpu will be fast enough for vista as long as you equip it with at least 1.5gb. I say 1.5gb because thats that amount i had when i first got vista and it never slowed down, and was generally quicker on my setup than XP was. This is because once you go past a certain amount of power in your setup, XP fails to scale that well, but vista being heavy weighted is no good for a powerless setup but is excellent at scaling in speed with faster setups. i found that with this CPU and 1.5gb, you would deffinatly benefit from upgrading to vista from xp (just like i did). Even though 2 gb is recomended, i found this setup more than enough.
One thing worth mentioning, this is one of the better overclockers out of thedual core range offered by amd, iv hit 2.7 ghz which performs like a 5200+!!!
This cpu would sit comfortably in any system at 2.4ghz with slight increase in voltage though.
The perfect ingredients for a budget vista setup would include this cpu as vista makes use of dual core for the operating system itself, 1.5gb of ram, although 2gb is fairly cheap now so you might as well go for that, and any graphics card that goes for £50 pounds.
To summarise, this is a good upgrade path for anyone with an am2 socket motherboard with an Athlon 64 cpu. if you can manage to sell your existing cpu, with the money you get from it, this cpu looks very cheap for the upgrade in power. And what a difference in performance in vista when you have dual core
www.overclockers.co.uk Buy with confidence and find the cheapest prices there!!!
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Very stable
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