My mate gave me £150 today to buy some parts to upgrade his crappy old pc. He doesn't know much about the internals so he left it to me to get what I thought would be suitable. My first thoughts were to spend the money on beer and wild women but my wife objected strongly to this so off I went to find the best cpu of them all, the XP2500 Barton. Could not find one anywhere, plenty of places advertising them but nobody has been able to get any stock of them for months. Couldn't afford to get an Athlon 64 so I decided on the new Amd Sempron 2400 retail pack for £51.99. Also picked up my favourite motherboard, the trusty old Asus A7N8X-X and 512Mb of pc3200 400DDR ram. This came to £156.00 so he owes me six quid already. While ripping out the internals of his old system I noticed that he had a 250 Watt power supply. Obviously this had to be chucked away as I didn't consider it to powerful enough to run a decent vibrator on 'stallion' setting. I happened to have a spare 350 watt psu lying around so I stuck that in, (that's going to cost him) and continued assembling the new kit. The first surprise came when I switched it on and it didn't boot up, no lights, no whirring, nothing. So I plugged it in and tried again with better results. What did surprise me was that it actually booted straight into windows XP which is almost unheard of after replacing a motherboard and processor and ram all in one go. I decided to re-install XP anyway as he had loads of crap on his hard drive and was using the fat 32 system. After the install I loaded a few programs and mucked about with things to see if the Sempron was any good and I have to say I am very impressed. I did some decrypting and compressing and defragmenting all at the same time and it handles it with no problems whatsoever. And it only runs at 1.66Ghz. His computer actually detects it as an Athlon but thats because I haven't downloaded the latest bios update yet which according to the Asus website is to make the motherboard Sempron compatable. It's definitely better than the Duron it was meant to replace and I would stick my neck out and say it's as good, if not better than the equivalent Athlon. Oh yeah...and cpu temp never went above 39 degrees, with no case fans.
