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AMD Upgrading Question

A

Avi44

Member
Okay, heres my situation. I have an extra $70 CDN to spend towards my new system. I can either upgrade my Processor from an AMD Athlon 64 3500 Venice (2.2ghz, 512k) to an Athlon 64 3700+ Sandiego (2.2ghz, 1024k). Both are socket 939.

The other option is to keep the Athlon 3500 Venice, and add an extra Kingston KVR400X64C3A/512 512MB PC3200 DDR400 to my current Kingston KVR400X64C3AK2/1G 2x512MB Dual Channel PC3200 DDR400. Meaning i'd have 3 sticks of 512 ram. The Mobo is the Asus A8N-E. Also I WONT BE OVERCLOCKING PERIOD! What should I do?
 
cpu no question....

extra 512 of ram wont do bull... maybe it will help with like 1 or 2 video editing things...

auctally i was thinking about it and why just not save your money... look at case fans or other better stuff... whats your hole computer?
 
Originally posted by: lambchops3344
cpu no question....

extra 512 of ram wont do bull... maybe it will help with like 1 or 2 video editing things...

auctally i was thinking about it and why just not save your money... look at case fans or other better stuff... whats your hole computer?
Click to expand...


Well, considering that the only difference between the 3500 and 3700 i mentioned is the extra 512k of cache, (they're both clocked at 2.2ghz), will this still be a better upgrade than the RAM?
 
The CPU is the better bet.

Putting only one extra stick of ram in will more than likely hurt performance because it will make the whole lot single channel.

Also with 3 sticks you are likely to have to use a 2T command rate which will hurt performance as well - although not by much.

The upgrade from a Venice to the San Diego is your best bet if you want to spend the money but the difference in performance is not that great - couple percent at most.

In real world terms I previously had a 3500 winchester and a 4000 clawhammer and they felt very similar. Only really separated by benchmarks.
 
If you want to OC the proc, 3700. If not, save the cash. Buy a game or pay for a couple months on WoW; FEED THE ADDICTION!
 
Thanks for the quick replies. In what instances will i notice the slight differences between the 3700 and 3500? And how slight is "slight".
 
Upto a couple percent. And mostly in gaming where the extra cache helps things along. But unless you always benchmark your games you won't see much difference.
 
Thanks for the info and links.

Here are my specs:
CPU- AMD Athlon 64 3500+ Venice
HD- WD 200G SATA Hard Drive (2000JD, 8M Buffer, 7200RPM)
Motherboard- Asus A8N-E
Case- Enermax CS125 or CS1250B
Power Supply- Enermax 450W or 465W Power supply
Video Card- ASUS GF FX6600GT 128M DDR3 DVI TVO
Video Card 2- Leatek WinFast TV2000 XP Expert
Memory- Kingston Dual Channel PC3200 (2x512)
Drives- LG 4163 16x DVD Writer Black
Monitor- Samsung 793DF Black
Speaker- Altec Lansing 121
Mouse- Microsoft Optical Mouse
Keyboard- Logitech Access Multimedia

Any other recommendations of what to do with the extra $70 CDN? Also, I was wondering what would be the recommended watt power supply for these specs. Some have told me that 450W would be more than enough, whereas some said that it wont be enough.
 
CPU is the better of the two options...a third RAM stick may force you to run the memory at slower speeds or even introduce stability problems (I cannot for the life of me get my 2 Corsair 512 MB XMS modules to coexist with my 2 GeiL 512 MB modules...although you were adding a third stick of the same type, which should be okay).

That said, neither option is all that great. You have a good system for the time being, and may be better served by saving your cash and waiting for the price to come down on the Athlon X2 chips.
 
Video Card- ASUS GF FX6600GT 128M DDR3 DVI TVO
Video Card 2- Leatek WinFast TV2000 XP Expert

I reckon u should save your money, there really wont be a noticebable difference when u upgrade to San Diego 3.7ghz, sure u would get some fps increase but not much. U listed your graphic cards above and 6600gt is your bottleneck when u game, u should save your money for a few months and get a x800xl or 7800gt. That would be a massive difference in games. If u dont game then get the San Diego.
 
Yeah, if this is for gaming, spend the extra money on your videocard.

6800 regular or an X800XL if that can be worked in.
 
I was reading another post saying that the dual core x2 3800 has been released. The poster was saying that prices on the single core 3800/3500/3700's should be dropping soon. Since I havent been actively watching the CPU markets until recently, do you think I should wait? How long would I have to wait, and how substantial will the price drop be approximately?
 
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