Current Setup:

Athlon 64 3500+ 512kb L2 Cache
7800GS OC Vid Card
1 GB Dual Channel RAM


Two questions:

1) Would I see a significant increase in performance by adding 1GB of RAM.
2) Would I see a significant increase in performance by upgrading to a Athlon 64 4000+ Clawhammer chip? (I have read that the 1MB L2 Cache makes a HUGE difference, but I am not sure).

4/30/2006 10:54:38 PM

You're not going to see a significant difference with either of those upgrades. You'll see some minor improvements depending on what you do with your computer. However, any difference you see will probably be below your threashold of personal perception.

4/30/2006 11:59:17 PM

if your gaming go for the extra 1gb of ram. my load times dropped the most when i went to 2gb and ran my games off my sata raptor. typically most cpu intensive operations also require a significant amount of memory... but this is all based on personal observation, no real hard evidence.

5/1/2006 12:12:32 AM

a frind of mine just got a raptor and has 2gbs of the same speed ram. i have 1gb and no raptor and my loads times were only a little over 1.5 times his(may sound like alot but i'd rather wait an extra 30 secs and have 200$ in my pocket). listen to darkone and save ur $. theres only a handful of instances right now where u can honeslty justify 1 gig+

[Edited on May 1, 2006 at 12:24 AM. Reason : .]

5/1/2006 12:22:53 AM

Id say the smarter upgrade would be going to the X2 series. I purcased my X2 4200+ over Easter break and wow..this thing is great in gaming, audio decoding, multitasking etc. You can get a X2 3800+ for under 300 bucks. You will suffer a slight fps hit for now in current gaming titles until they optimize the games for dual core. However almost all new games are being written to use both cores. (i.e. Serious Sam 2, Oblivion, BF2, UT2007, etc etc)

5/1/2006 1:02:47 PM

What are you using this system for? The performance gained by any upgrade will vary based on this.

5/1/2006 1:47:45 PM

straight gaming.... It is a 3 year old Alienware system that I have upgraded along the way.....

are the X2's socket 939? I'm not trying to upgrade the mobo (especially since I just got the AGP 7800GS not too long ago).

5/1/2006 6:58:10 PM

yes, i just went from a64 3000+ skt939 to X2 3800+

5/1/2006 8:09:56 PM

it depends if the motherboard can support x2 processors, even with a bios update

5/3/2006 12:03:12 PM

almost every 939 mobo can support X2's by now. (They all did BIOS updates)

5/3/2006 12:58:06 PM