Hi,

Is the VIA C7-D 1.5ghz processor better/worse/same than the AMD Athlon XP2400 2ghz processor?


Thanks

The C7-D is about the same speed as a PIII-800. However, it will use less power than the Athlon.

There's a bunch of way to quantify "better".

Cost
Noise
General computing
FPU performance
Motherboard size
Power consumption

Probably more, if you really wanted to get into it. In general, the Athlon will be faster in every possible measure and a lot cheaper. I mean, you can find them for $10 or something on Ebay, while VIA's seem to go for $100 or more. The only thing the VIA really has the advantage in is power consumption and maybe motherboard size. For the time it worked, I loved my VIA C3 based system. Idled at 10 watts and ran linux acceptably. However it eventually failed and replacement parts are so expensive it wasn't worth fixing.

The C7/MB combinations have ridiculously low power consumption profiles that make the Atom combos seem hungry. For any media or heavy general purpose context switching stuff, the C7 is indeed around the same as a P3/P4 at ~70% comparable clockspeed. However, because of its built-in encryption hardware, it outperforms even non-hardware-encryption i7 CPUs at ~2x the clockspeed at a fraction of the watts. So for any sort of NAS-wth-disk-encryption or router-with-SSH/SSL-encryption, it's a perfect CPU choice.

I have a C7-D that i use as my media server (although unencrypted, so i can't vouch for that part of it).

I also have a C3 that i'm donating as an itunes server for my sisters gym, all it needs to do is play music, so i guess it'll work, or, i'm hoping it'll work.

the C3 has a generic P3 heatsink on it, with no fan, and i've run it for hours and hours, and to be honest, case fan or no case fan, it just works. it doesn't overheat, it doesn't throttle, it just keeps going.

The C3 and the C7-D both are more than capable of running off 150W or less, with some full blown system inside. i haven't had a chance to put my 9600GT inside with my C7-D, but i don't see why it would have any problems, just a whimpy little C7-D with insane graphics.

I use my C7-D for movies, so it really makes no difference to me. The C3 i've actually never really had a chance to use, it was given to me a few months ago, but i didn't have a use for something from the P3 era...my best computers run DDR2 RAM, what am i going to do with SDRAM and IDE at this point?

unless you're gaming, go for the C7-D, it's got plenty of power for office productivity, youtube and facebook.