Athlon XP 3200 vs Sempron 3400 (Socket 754), which one?

[jtelep]

I am currently running an Athlon XP 3200+ and am trying to figure out if I should keep it or upgrade to a Sempron 3400+ I know, if I am going to upgrade at all I should be seriously considering at least an X2 or even FX (should I stay on the AMD side) but I have this processor and MB right now and am just trying to figure out which one I should keep and which one I should give to my kid. I do quite a bit of gaming and have just recently taken an interest in video editing so I want to be sure that I am making the right move. If I understand the Sempron correctly it is kind of like AMD's version of the Celeron so I don't want to go with something that is going to give me degraded performance if the Athlon XP 3200+ would be better to stick with because of things like L2 cache and such.

Thanks.

 

[Zap]

The Sempron will be faster overall, IMO. While the XP 3200+ was the fastest for socket A, the Sempron is basically an Athlon 64 3000+ with half the cache. Now, that doesn't sound as bad as it seems because it isn't hurt too much by lack of cache. The reason that Celerons have a bad name is because the Willamette and Northwood Celerons had 128k cache and (eventually) a much lower FSB than the Pentium 4 chips. The Netburst architecture places a higher performance demand on the cache so having so little really hurt it. With the Athlon 64 design, it isn't hurt as much from having less cache. Also, the bus speeds (HyperTransport) is the same as the Athlon 64 and it has the same integrated memory controller.

The other thing is that if you're an overclocker, the socket 754 Palermo Semprons (which is what you have) are known to be decent overclockers. My 3300+ can do a 700MHz overclock, give or take.