Old hardware advice please

[FriedRiceBob]

Without dumping any money into it, I'm going to have to move to using some of my older hardware for my everyday computing and some gaming to include WOW (nothing cutting edge really).

At my disposal I can do either:
AMD Athlon XP @ ~2.0ghz (Unlocked laptop chip, does 2-2.1 stable, from what I remember)
Abit nForce2 motherboard (AN7)
nVidia 6800 128mb AGP (can't remember if I could unlock extra pipelines)

or

AMD Sempron 3400+ (2.0ghz) (has x64, but no XP64)
compaq ATI Xpress200 mobo
Radeon x850XT 256mb PCI-E

The system would have 1gb dual channel in either board (only one set of ram), although the nforce2 can make it do 400DDR vs 333 in the compaq mobo (RAM defaults 333 but does 400 fine/stable/etc).
From when I had both of these systems up they were pretty close, I think the xt850 was a stronger VC, but the nforce2 could ring more out of the RAM and etc.
Thoughts? advice? If nothing else, I'll probably just pick on the flip of a coin tomorrow and install OS on one...

 

[Boobs McGee]

I would probably go with option 2. IIRC those semprons were pretty decent performers. The video cards should be fairly close in performance for WOW.

 

[SonicIce]

Well the x850xt is about 1.5 to 2 times faster than the 6800 vanilla (in the benchmarks that I've found, but havent found one for WOW). And The Semprons based on Socket 754/939 will beat a similarly clocked Athlon XP.

http://www.tomshardware.com/re...a-charts-iv,893-7.html
http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/200/8

 

[FriedRiceBob]

I indeed went with the sempron and it's doing pretty admirably, considering it's some 4 years old.

I self-modded the compaq bios to give me access to the memory timings, and I'm using Clockgen in windows to push the Sempron to 2200. The xt850 is also getting a dose of catalyst overdrive.

 

[jae]

nice work.