I have a AMD Athlon 64 3500+ Venice in my "good" good computer. (the one with all the goodies in it). Would it make sense to upgrade to the AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+ Toledo (link) as final upgrade for this box? I can move the old processor over to another box, currently running a 3200+ processor. I've been considering it since the processor prices are down. I already have 2 GBs of RAM, a decent nVidia GeForce graphics card and 5.1 soundblaster card running Win XP. I may do a new box build next year, but I'm thinking this might get me another 18-24 months of solid use out of the current box.
Entirely personal preference IMO. I've never been one to chase the leading edge of performance, just never made any sense to me, and I never had the need. Well, maybe I did back in the day when the difference between an 8086 and an 80286 was significant, but it's been a long time since I bought a new PC or upgraded solely for performance reasons. I assume you're looking for a performance boost from the SMP capability, but you haven't mentioned how you use the PC. If it's not running multiple well written multi-threaded applications simultaneously you're wasting your money, you won't see much difference in performance over a non-SMP CPU of equivalent clock speed. FYI, I do most of my programming on a 933 MHz Pentium III w/512M of RAM that I put together years ago. And I'm typing this from a used 3 GHz P4 Dell SX270 that I bought for $200 on eBay a few weeks ago. Just remember - all computers wait at the same speed.
I am running 3500+ Venice too! You can oc this close to 3 GHz with combo of good RAM and Video card and of course oc them all. Not sure if you want to go water cooling on CPU, GPU..etc. Dual core is good if you multi-task a lot. Otherwise your venice is sweat enough.
Absolutely. Its a huge difference for a few bucks. I agree the core 2 rocks however in your situation an upgrade would make sense.
I'd say unless you really need the extra - core for cpu intensive tasks (ripping dvds etc) your puter is just fine.
LOL Ripping DVD's isn't cpu intensive. Running Crysis at the highest settings is a good test for a computer and will probably be the new benchmark when it is released.
The 'puter rocks at performance and multi-tasking, I'm just looking to see if it's worth doing that one final upgrade so I can leave it 'til it dies or becomes a back up. So what I'm hearing is that it's 6 of one and 1/2 dozen of the other. I do run Photoshop, vectoring and one other graphics program all at once, so I need the system to be stable. Thanks for the opinions.
