Athlon64 3000 or 3700

DirkVoodoo

Ive done some research/thread searching, and while I can see clearly the difference between processors when running HL2 with all the bells and whistles, i cant find an easy answer to my question. I dont want to bother you lads with a really trivial scenario, but here I go:

For this new rig I want some element of "future proofing" and was looking at the X2 3800+ processor as a "budget" dual core processor, however its still a bit pricy for me considering that dual cores havent taken off in gaming yet, and this will be a predominantly gaming PC (about 60% of the time) with the remainder of its usage (3+1...carry the 2....subtract 20.....uhhhhh,...40%) going to internet and MS Office tasks.

So I thought I might scale down now and wait till dual cores become more affordable. To that end, I chose the 3700+ processor with the 1MB cache, however I saw a benchmark that said cache is a major bottleneck in pentiums for gaming, but in AMDs, due to "memory on die" or something, the performance difference between 512 and 1MB yields negligible fps improvements.

So, getting to the meat of my question: Would I be crazy to buy a 3000+/3200+ now, and buy an X2 in a year? Will I be able to play games for a few days before my hardware is out of date? Or should I just bite the bullet now and buy the 3700+, wait 2 yrs and buy a whole new rig?

Thanks

Richard Dower

Trust me, get the 3700+....the price has dropped alot and this chip can go to the least 2.5-2.6GHz.

WizZard

I would advise the 3700+ too, over the 3000+

po0k

X2 3800+ if you can afford it, there's nothing like having two brains instead of one :)

Otherwise, yeah, the 3700 is lovely. you can always drop in an X2 skt939 later, as I also plan to do (if i don't bite the bullet and go sktF+DDR2 before then).

Slightly Off-topic: People who say dualcore/multicore is pointless because games don't use it [yet] are, in my humble and oft humourously abusive and blunt opinion, fúcking morons. Don't listen to them.

DirkVoodoo

Thanks for the advice guys, as usual it seems that the answer to "who ya gonna call?" is rarely the ghsotbusters *sighs*, but the collective wisdom of the boards.

3700 it is...and whats this socket F lark? Is socket 939 redundant already?

Richard Dower

Socket 939 will be around for awhile yet. Socket M2 is planned for Q1/2 of 2006.

Sparky

FFS, and ive just built a s939 rig, ah well

po0k

Aye Sparky - same boat here, and I paid 300eur for a msi stock x800XL....

Sparky

new tech. is moving to fast, damn if i had 10,000 euros you know what i would do with it