I've just put together an Athlon XP 3000+ system for a family member. I was
disappointed at the CPU and memory performance compared to my own Pentium 4
2.6-GHz (400-Mhz FSB) system. I thought that the Athlon XP 3000+ would be at
least a little faster.

I ran several benchmarks, but here are my PCMark04 scores just for the sake
of comparison:

P4 2.4 GHz (100-MHz system bus):
------------------------
CPU: 3408
Memory: 2553 (1 GB of PC2100 DDR266)
HDD: 1640 (WD 80-GB IDE)


Athlon XP 3000+ (166-MHz system bus):
------------------------------
CPU: 2825
Memory: 1620 (1 GB PC3200 DDR400)
HDD: 4690 (WD 80-GB SATA)


Both systems have an 80-GB Western Digital hard disk drive, but the hard
disk performance of the Athlon system is impressive, presumably because of
SATA support. (The hard disk in the Pentium 4 system is connected to a
Promise Ultra133 TX2 card.)

The motherboard in the Athlon system is an ABIT VA-20, and both systems are
running Win XP SP2. I've triple-checked the BIOS settings and everything
appears to be set correctly.

Is this performance typical for an Athlon XP 3000+? Is the VA-20 just a
crappy motherboard?