Searching for a little enlightenment

[mezrah]

I've always stayed a generation or two behind the current trends, never really having the necessity for "top of the line" components. I currently have an Athlon XP 2700+. I'm looking at a Socket 754 Sempron 64 3400+.

I believe the socket 754 semprons are really athlon 64's with less L2 cache, unlike the socket A semprons which are based off the xp's.

So, even though the xp 2700+ and the sempron 64 3400+ are nearly identical in mhz, and cache, I should see some performance increase from the newer architecture (including SSE2 and SSE3) correct?

TYIA!!

Before somebody asks, I will be using the same 1 gb of corsair value ram, same 80 gb IDE hd, but moving to the BIOSTAR TForce6100 board. The newer motherboard probably couldn't hurt performance either...

 

[aka1nas]

SSE2 and 3 won't help you at all as few apps are optimized for it. The main advantage of going to a K8-based CPU is the Integrated memory controller, which gives you something like a 30% performance advantage clock-per-clock over an Athlon XP.

 

[ElFenix]

it'll be faster in games and encoding. it'll be faster at general windows things too, but about any amd processor over 1 ghz is fast enough for windows. if you plan much gaming you'll need a new pcie card, that 9600XT won't work