Is it me, or does this upgrade seem worth it

[mismajor99]

Well I decided to upgrade my PC last week with a new processor(754 pin). I had an athlon 64 3200+ Revision C0 with 1mb L2 cahce to an athlon 64 3700+ 1mb cache. I noticed a considerable jump in performace, not only with applications but with gaming as well. The difference in 2.0 ghz to 2.4ghz was much bigger than i thought.

Is there something with the athlon 64 bit chips that would make them so much better between a 2.0 to a 2.4ghz chip? All in all, I had a Asus K8V that I packaged with the chip and sold it on ebay. It only cost me 40 bucks to upgrade after all is said and done. My current rig seems to be fine and I can't see pumping out more money than this upgrade in the near future. I'm hoping that my setup will last for another year.

 

[imported_Kensai]

Should last even longer when you upgrade your video card as the 3700+ can pump out a fair ammount of information to the GPU.

 

[mismajor99]

Is it worth upgrading my videocard when there are new technologies like NVIDIA SLI and ATI Crossfire out there. My M/B won't support either of those setups and I would think that these would be better money spent. Also, my setup doesn't support dual channel ram that you get with the 939 pin M/B's.

I didn't think my 9800XT would be a bottleneck so soon.

 

[SlitheryDee]

Let's say that performance-wise, a 2 Ghz 3200+ is the equivalent of a 3.2 ghz pentium 4.

For the pentium 4 a 400 mhz upgrade is a 12.5 % increase in speed over the original 3.2 ghz.

For the A64 the 400 mhz upgrade is a 20% increase in speed. After the upgrades the A64 will be the better performer because it gets more performance out of each clock cycle. They started even, but the A64 ended up about 7.5% faster.

Remember there's only 600 mhz total difference between a $200 3200+ and a ~$800 FX-55.