going from sempron 2600. any idea?

[larciel]

I was looking at replacing my sempron2600 socket 754. when running vmware.. computer slugs like a snail .. i was hoping that A64 2800 or 3000 would be good investment. or how about those 64bit semprons . would that offer similar performance to A64 or won't it matter because I run 32bit software?

thanks in adv

 

[Uhtrinity]

You will only see an improvement if you go up in clockspeed. At the same clockspeed the performance difference will be minimal.

 

[Furen]

Sempron 64s would offer the same performance as a regular Sempron. I think you're limited by:
a) The size of the L2 cache, which an A64 with 1MB or 512K L2 would solve (you only have 128k of L2 right now), since VMware has to do a lot of "transcoding" and going back to main memory so often will give you a huge performance hit.
b) The clockspeed, which any cpu faster than the 2800+ would take care of.
And, c) your memory bandwidth. This would require you to change to socket 939, since I dont think any socket 754 motherboards support the additional E3 memory ratios and the second channel of 939 would give you lots of bandwidth.

 

[DrMrLordX]

You could just OC your Sempron. Tried that yet?