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GPUs and CPUs

AMD Athlon XP

6owners with an opinion
80%of verdicts positive
3/1positive/negative since 2024
5 yrslongest happy owner
1happy after 3+ years

Praised for reliability and performance; criticized for durability.

What owners wrote

Likes itOwned 5 yearsStill going
My main is an old desktop, amd athlon xp 2400, nvidia nforce2 motherboard, and nvidia fx 7600 graphics card, dual 17in monitors, running win7. 5 years old, still does everything i need like a champ. My laptop is a 6year old off brand celeron 1.7ghz processor, running debian stable. Still works fine, albeit a little big. I will upgrade when things break.
Doesn’t like it
Ouch, that poor die :( I remember it well, back in the very early 2000s, when my own Athlon XP 1800+ (an AGOIA stepping, I do know that for sure :D) met its untimely end at the hands of a device that was designed to prevent the exact misfortune that killed its sister CPU as seen in this submission! The fragile silicon was a problem the enthusiast/PC-builder community was very aware of, and the market responded with "spacer" kits you could buy for a few $$$ that were cut from solid sheets of thin copper. These spacers would carefully wrap around all the little bumps on the CPU's upper side, and provide a level plane for the heatsink to rest upon, while still establishing direct contact with the die that it was supposed to cool down. So there was, in theory, decidedly less of a chance of killing your CPU by having the heatsink meet it in an unfortunate angle, or something to that effect. Unfortunately, the spacer that I had bought turned out to be just a wee little bit too thick, and, despite thermal paste (Arctic Silver!), the CPU did not in fact make contact with the heatsink (something shiny from Thermalright or Zalman, I think?) at all, which killed it instantly as soon as I powered up the rig for the first time. That's what it was like back in the days, when we got to school walking ten miles uphill (both ways) barefoot in deep snow. I had to put in some overtime at the small PC shop I worked after school back then, to afford a measly Duron 800 as its replacement. And stil…
Neutral
The first computer I bought with my own money was an Athlon XP. Probably got the motherboard and CPU from Comp USA or Office Max or something. I bought it specifically to play The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind! It felt like it was obsolete in a week, the way Moore's Law was rocking at that time. And yeah, when I opened the box and saw that the CPU had a fragile ceramic/glass top like that, I had a mini panic attack. These days, of course I have a few in my retro collection, but I'll never remove the heatsinks. The CPU and motherboards might as well be one unit, never to be separated again.
Likes it
The article links to a list of "The five greatest AMD CPUs". I've owned two and a half of these! Athlon XP 1800+, Ryzen 7 1700 (I had the 1800X which was just a higher bin of the same chip), and Ryzen 9 3950X. That same article also says that extending x86 to 64 bits "wasn't hard", which I'm not so sure about. There are plenty of mistakes AMD could have made and cleanups they could have missed, but they handled it all quite well AFAICS.
Likes it
The Athlon XP was the bigger milestone, as I remember it. They were both "seventh generation" according to their marketing, but you could get an entire GHz+ Athlon XP machine for much less than half the $990 tray price from the article. I distinctly remember the day work bought a 5 or 6 node cluster for $2000. (A local computer shop gave us a bulk discount and assembled it for them, so sadly, I didn't poke around inside the boxes much.) We had a Solaris workstation that retailed for $10K in the same office. Its per-core speed was comparable to one Athlon machine, so the cluster ran circles around it for our workload. Intel was completely missing in action at that point, despite being the market leader. They were about to release the Pentium 4, and didn't put anything decent out from then to the Core 2 Duo. (The Pentium 4 had high clock rates, but low instructions per cycle, so it didn't really matter. Then AMD beat Intel to market with 64 bit support.) I suspect history is in the process of repeating itself. My $550 AMD box happily runs Qwen 3.5 (32B parameters). An nvidia board that can run that costs > 4x as much.
Likes it
> Thus expected lifetime quickly becomes long enough that it's effectively not an issue for CPUs and GPUs if you provide sufficient cooling. Both yes and no. I still have an old AMD Athlon XP system, which works at 2200MHz (200x11), which is completely out of spec for that generation of AMD systems (2200MHz parts had 166MHz bus), and it still performs as on day one since it's not overclocked and cooled well. On the other hand, we change parts which fry because they feel like it even they are not even close to their thermal limits, because they're kept in well cooled data center. Sometimes, things go bzzt even without extreme heat. It's really interesting. Something is working at full throttle with no problems, you update a couple of things, reboot, and the device is gone for good.