Athlon 3800 or 4000?

[lcplsickoll]

I can get a Athlon 64 3800 for $322 or a 4000 for $372. Is the extra $50 justified. I realize the only real difference is the 512K L2 on the 3800 and the 1M L2 on the 4000. In benchmarks I really haven't seen any real difference in gaming performance, which is almost exclusively what I use my machine for. What do you guys think? Is it worth the extra $50 or is the 3800 just as good? Thanks ahead of time.
The reason I'm not looking into the X2's is because the games aren't taking advantage of the dual core yet. By the time they do I'll most likely be doing the Crossfire thing and upgrading everything again.

[Pentagon_Man]

Save your money for a dual core, no games on the market use it yet though If AMD makes it they will come. You could OC your current CPU and get it close to the same performance. Your system specs look like they will last you and play new games for some time to come. If you do not already have them raided raptors HDs are great.

Too answer your question the 3800 has the best dollar to clock ratio. I'm not sure if the 512k is worth it. But then there is are a ton of online mags for this type of advice, I like to start with CNET but try to find others to see if the reports are consistant.

[lcplsickoll]

I've done alot of research and everything I've seen, as far as gaming goes, put the 3800 and 4000 neck and neck. The X2's are slower than both the 4000 and 3800 until you get up to the x2 4800. Like I said I'll upgrade everthing, CPU, MOBO, Crossfire, and Video cards when the games call for the dual core stuff. I upgrade often, usually every 3-4 months. They have the same clock but different L2 caches. I recently went up to the A8N-E for the PCI-E and can't get a stable OC over 220x9 which is only 1980mhz. I have to change my sig. Therefore I want to upgrade the processor. The raptors from what I've seen offer negligible performance increases in gaming and RAID also (Flaming starts now), but I've looked into it and there's very very little difference in gaming.

[Noni]

Get The 3800!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Snake101]

I would go for the 3800, some do say that the 4000 is the best bang for the buck...but it's all up to you :)

[lcplsickoll]

Lol...I take it you have one Noni. I'm starting to lean that way. I'll probably pick one up from ZipZoomFly.com today. The ship free 2nd day air and I'm impatient.

[Noni]

No my mate has one, to be honest i would go for the 3700+ san deigo because it has the 1mb cache instead of the 3800's 512k one.

but out of those 2 3800 is in my opinion better value for money.

Good luck for whatever you choose!

[Got3n™]

the cache is more than worth the $50 IMO.

[lcplsickoll]

I've only seen that large cache make noticable differences in speed during mulitasking but not really in gaming. From what I've researched it seems the clock speed has more of an impact. I'll look into some head to heads with the 3700 too.

[Noni]

Heres a another thing to think about

cache cannot be changed but core speeds can be overclocked....

3700+ San diego is the one i would pick.

[MazXFreddy]

I have the 3800+, and it runs great. Nothing has really pushed it to the limit yet, but I'd say if you have the extra $50 around, go for the 4000+

[R3d|Rav3n]

I've only seen that large cache make noticable differences in speed during mulitasking but not really in gaming. From what I've researched it seems the clock speed has more of an impact. I'll look into some head to heads with the 3700 too.

I'd say the extra cache is worth the $50 for me. Current games may not use it but future games will. And I do a lot of multitasking (packing/unpacking rar files, video/photo editing, etc) so the cache would be used now rather than later.


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don't even bother looking up my BF2 stats... I suck!

[djstubbs]

Go for the 4000+, no regrets.

[locborg]

Go for the 4000+, no regrets.

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