ordering my new processor tommorow and found these two athlon 64 3700+ 1mb L2 cache san diego oem for 63pounds athlon 64 4000+ 1mb L2 cache san diego oem for 93pounds question is is the 4000+ worth the extra 30pounds and which one has the best overclocking potental also would both be ok running with a 7600gt to play fps games like quake4/doom3/fear/hl2/prey. ok with decent settings. thanks all. or even AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 3800+ retail for 105pounds be better than both.
The single cores would win in gaming I'm sure - however for general multi-tasking use the Dual Core would whoop the other two - dual core is a good way to go and for that little bit extra you'll see a nice performance boost if you multi-task (run different apps at the same time) or run multi-threaded apps / games.
The Dual Core CPU will still handle games very very well. If you want to squeeze every last FPS out of a rig then a fast Single Core CPU is the way to go (Unless we're talking about multi-threaded games). I say Dual Core - simlpy because it'll still perform well in games but gives you much better multitasking performance as well.
I can run the games you listed at 1024x768 with medium detail on an Athlon64 3000+ and a GeForce 6600GT smoothly (having 1GB of RAM doesn't hurt either). Whatever you go with will be fine. Given that they're the same core, the 3700+ would have more OC potential because it's a slower speed CPU to start with. Of course, overclocking is based, at least in part, on luck.
well on the game thing if the core speed of the dual core is as high as the single core than it will work just as good, and even then theres a lot of games already that are taking advantage of dual core processors, or dual gpu. Not even to metion how most every game to come will take advantage of multiple cores. Its just a really good idea to get a dual core cpu, it the wave of the very near future and in some places it already is
The 3700+ has 1MB Cache (for the single core) and runs at 2.2GHz The 4000+ has 1MB Cache (for the single core) and runs at 2.4GHz The 3800+ X2 has 1MB Cache (512KB Cache Per core so it's 2 x 512KB Cache) and runs at 2.0Ghz
The 3800 X2 will still perform very well in games but you get the big advantage of having 2 processing cores, that's my personal choice though. I say the 3800 X2 but ultimately it's up to you isn't it.
