Thinking of upgrading from a 2800 sempron to a 3200 Venice, what sort of performance increase can i expect, if any? I mostly play CSS and BF2 and Live for Speed in particular. Basically the northbridge fan has died on my Socket A motherboard and its gave me the want to upgrade. I know i could easily but a new NB fan,but ive wanted to upgrade for ages.

What sort of performance improvement can i expect?

Specs will probably be:

3200 Venice
That Asrock mobo that supports AGP and PCI-E
1GB GeIL Value 3200
AGP 6800 @ 350/700@16/6
80GB Maxtor SATA

Cheers for any info.

I assume the 6800 is your current card? If so, I see no problem with that upgrade.

Except for the hard drive. Why so small? Since I'm pretty sure no Socket A boards had SATA support, I assume that's not your current drive.

Yes, my Skt A mobo was SATA capable, and ive only got an 80 as that all that was affodable whe i need to replace my 30GB, and i dont really download a lot. Still got 20GB spare on that 80GB drive.

I have all the components off mycurrent rig, the only things changing will be the CPU and motherboard

Worth it, but you must (yes must ) clock that venice higher, it doesn't break a sweat at clock speed and if your mobo is decent can do an easy 2.4 / 2.5ghz which really makes it near the fastest single core chips available today. Seeing as you overclocked your 6800 you're into this and its worth it

At stock clock speed it will absolutely own your old system. And not overclocking an A64 should be made illegal by law.

[off topic]what the fastest socket a processor available?[/off topic]

Quote from Jakg :

[off topic]what the fastest socket a processor available?[/off topic]

I think its the 3200+ @ 400mhz fsb. Thats the fastest I could find when I bought mine Maybe just a slight possibility of a 3400+, not sure though, also not sure they may have made an FX for soA.

Quote from pb32000 :

I think its the 3200+ @ 400mhz fsb. Thats the fastest I could find when I bought mine Maybe just a slight possibility of a 3400+, not sure though, also not sure they may have made an FX for soA.

ahh, i gotta 2800+, so its not really worth upgrading that until i go 939!

Yeah, the fastest Socket A CPU was the Athlon XP 3200+, clocked at 2.2GHz with the Barton core (512KB cache). The Socket A Semprons are actually based on the older core, Throughbred, and have half the cache (256KB), making them cheaper to manufacture.

In my experience a Sempron of e.g. 2800 will not perform close to an AthlonXP 2800+. It would be closer to An Athlon 2200-2600, depending on what your doing with it. In some tests, my Athlon 2000 with a mild overclock will outperform a Sempron 2800. Thus the new mobo/cpu combo your thinking of will absolutely own your current one, and if the mobo is good you should be able to clock it quite far.

If your going to upgrade I would even be looking at say a,

AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ 2.0GHz Dual Core Socket 939 512K L2 Cache

Dual Core cpu, its the future and you would be more Future proof then the single core 3200+ Of course this depends on your budget but if you can afford it for sure go for the dual core you will be VERY happy with it.

Ciao

If you want to estimate the performance gain of your old to your new processor you should take into account what exactly the numbers apply to.

First of all the numbers of the Semprons apply to a similar powerful Intel Celeron, while the Athlons apply to the Pentium 4s.

Furthermore the Athlon 64 CPUs apply to newer versions of Intel CPUs which are more powerful. So an Athlon 64 3200+ is already slightly faster than an Athlon XP 3200+.

Taking all of this into consideration you should have a pretty good performance-gain by upgrading from a socket A Sempron 2800+ to a socket 939 Athlon 3200+.


About the Asrock mainboards...

They are not very good in general. Asrock is the cheapie-brand of Asus and so they are mostly low quality. If you are lucky you won't have any problems with it, but the probability of incompatibilities or other problems with different hardware is way bigger than with a good Asus board. And you are talking about a mainboard with AGP and PCIe and AFAIK these boards have an ULI-chipset. These chipsets are widely known to be crap in terms of performance, stability and compatibility.

An Asus mainboard with an nForce chipset or at least a chipset of VIA or SiS may be a bit more expensive but it pays off in the end. The mainboard is one of the parts in a computer you should always buy with good quality. The mainboard is the part that connects all the different hardware and peripherals of a computer and regulates their communication with each other. A bad layot or cheap parts there can make the whole computer a pure pain in the a**.

And about dual core:

Dual core is the future - no doubt about that. But if you are on a low budget it might still be a bit too early for them. But that depends on what software you want to run on them. Most software still doesn't make any use of the second core. I must admit that I don't know about LFS exactly, but I highly doubt, that it can use the second core. But I can't give you any good suggestions in this part as I don't know what software apart from LFS you are running or are willing to run in the future. And I also can't foresee how quickly the software industry will adapt dual core in the near future. I just wanted to give you a hint on the advantages of dual core and the use of it for your personal needs.

I hope I could help you to make a good decision.

Christian Seidel, check out this review. This is the board in question (in English, doesn't seem to be a problem for you, though):

http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=2524

In terms of performance, the board is right up there. Overall they speak very highly of it. I'm still very surprised that no one else has come out with a similar concept of both AGP and PCI-E on the same board, especially when you take a look at Valve's most recent survey results. They show that only about 27% of Steam users have a PCI-E video card. Granted, most of those with AGP cards right now probably don't know how to swap a motherboard, there are still some (like me) who do and want to keep their high end AGP card for a little longer. In my particular case, I'm pretty sure that in most games my Athlon XP is limiting my performance, not my 6800GT.

Quote from Forbin :

Christian Seidel, check out this review. This is the board in question (in English, doesn't seem to be a problem for you, though):

http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=2524

In terms of performance, the board is right up there. Overall they speak very highly of it. I'm still very surprised that no one else has come out with a similar concept of both AGP and PCI-E on the same board, especially when you take a look at Valve's most recent survey results. They show that only about 27% of Steam users have a PCI-E video card. Granted, most of those with AGP cards right now probably don't know how to swap a motherboard, there are still some (like me) who do and want to keep their high end AGP card for a little longer. In my particular case, I'm pretty sure that in most games my Athlon XP is limiting my performance, not my 6800GT.

As I said: maybe you won't have any problems.

Unfortunately I can't read the article since I always get an error message when trying to open it. I even looked on anandtech for the article and found it but the error remains - so there is no problem with the link you provided.

But to be more specific: with performance I didn't only mean the performance of the CPU. Since the Athlon 64 has its own memory-controller on-chip there are no big diferences in performance on this side on all socket 939 mainboards. But there are also other components to be considered. I mean for example ATA/SATA controllers, USB controllers and NICs and such stuff. Or how good the connection to the PCI slots is or how good the onboard sound is. In these terms you find very big differences between various mainboards. But such things are usually not tested in anandtech reviews. Also the compatibility to different hardware like various gfx-cards or RAM-modules of different manufacturers is usually not tested or at least not mentioned. But the c't (a german IT-mag which has a very high reputation over here) does these kinds of tests. And in their tests the ULi-chipset Asrock boards usually fail a lot of the mentioned points.

So maybe you're lucky, but don't blame me if you're not...

Hmm, strange. The link works fine for me.

You may have a point about the possible compatibility issues and general fit and finish, but I never had a problem with the one ALi (ULi's old name) board I had. The only reason I had it was because I was tasked with writing a review on it. It was just a little slower than similar boards. In fact, I've never had problems with any motherboard.

Hehehe...
I also know some people who never had any problems with one of the worst reviewed mainboards I remember. I'm speaking about the Elitegroup K7S5A (and also its derivates). But these people bought this mainboard as part of a complete PC in which the manufacturer only used parts that are known to work with it.

Cheapie mainboards are always a bit of a gamble if you buy them seperately. IMHO at least...

I had a K7S5A as my very first Socket A board, and at the time i found it great as i hadnt tried others. My dad is still using a K7S5A now. When i upgraded to an MSI the performance jump was huge, just off the board.

Ive ordered the Asrock board and the 3200 Venice now as the shop i bought from had the chip on special for £105. So far ive heard good things about the board, and know a few overclockers that use them and also speak highly of them, so ill risk it. £145 for a board and a CPU, was cheaper than i exected it to be. Ill report back when ive installed the gear if its of use to anyone.

You will have about 10-20 FPS more in Lfs with this upgrade!
But the 3200+ "Venice" is good for overclocking!
My friends 3200+"Venice" on a DFI Lanparty uT nF4 ultra-D is @ 2700mhz without problems at a v-core of 1.41v

PS: Its better you buy the AMD AthlonX2 3800+!On a DFI Lanparty it goes up to 2800mhz without problems!
But the best for overclocking is a Opteron!