AMD 64 Chips

1982

I currently have an AMD64 3000 Winchester and seeing the price of AMD chips recently am considering an upgrade.

Can anyone tell me which is the better chip:

The AMD Athlon 64 3700+ San Diego (Socket 939) with 1MB L2 cache

OR

AMD Athlon 64 3800+ Venice (Socket 939) with only 512Kb L2 cache

Does the L2 cache make that much of a diffence?

***Just noticed the offer on the 3700 has ended and has been replaced with an offer for the AMD Athlon 64 4000+ San Diego (Socket 939) - OEM for £77.49. Is this the best price on this spec chip at the moment?

Cheers

titewad_2

The San Diego is the newer of the two chips (although some will say that is quite dated now) It also has the larger cache.As far as I have been told this is the amount pages in front it can handle..

Amalea

IIRC the Winchester were made using the 130nm process but the Venice and San Diego were made using the 90nm process. In english its a better process which I think reduces heat and power consumption.
The 3700+ San Diego is the same as the 3500+ Venice, the only difference is the cache. So the 3800+ Venice should be faster than the 3700+ San Diego, just with less cache.
Im guessing you're looking on Overclockers as I too saw the 4000+ on offer and am tempted by it. Bare in mind if you are staying with socket 939 for a while then if you can afford it it may be a good idea to get one as soon you wont be able to get any socket 939 chips as they are no longer manufactured.

CIS

Before you upgrade make sure that your MOBO will support the higher speed chip.

1982

i have an MSI K8N Neo Platinum MOBO so it will handle up to AMD 4000+. Yeah the 4000+ San diago seems to be a good offer comes to about £82 once you add delivery but it is still a fair bit cheaper than other online stores. Think i will add a silent cpu cooler as well to get rid of the noisy stock AMD one and make use of the delivery fee.

wolfman

Amalea wrote:

IIRC the Winchester were made using the 130nm process but the Venice and San Diego were made using the 90nm process.

"Winnie's" are 90mn too. In fact I think all socket 939 cpu's are 90mn. I think it's the core's that ran on socket 754 that were 130nm.

Venice/San Diego basically implement SSE3, better memoroy management, and run faster on less voltage. To be honest the difference is marginal, although it's always worth getting one over a Winchester as there's virtually no price difference.

1982

cheers folks. Made my mind up on the 4000 san diago now and i can sell the winchester chip for £25 odd so it will only be about £65 for the processor and silent fan upgrade Job done i'd say LOL Cheers guys

akmodi

Hi 1982,

Could you tell us where you are getting the 4000 for the price you mentioned?

I may think about it.

Thanks

1982

Aye sure its in the "this week only" section on the front page of https://www.overclockers.co.uk

Amalea

wolfman wrote:

"Winnie's" are 90mn too. In fact I think all socket 939 cpu's are 90mn. I think it's the core's that ran on socket 754 that were 130nm.

Venice/San Diego basically implement SSE3, better memoroy management, and run faster on less voltage. To be honest the difference is marginal, although it's always worth getting one over a Winchester as there's virtually no price difference.

Doh, quick check seems to show it was Newcastle not Winchester on 130nm. I should do more homework it seems! I did remember rightly that its an older chipset though! Hehe.

As to original poster, if you are looking for a good cpu cooler Zalman are good. I have the Zalman CNPS7700-CU Ultra-Quiet CPU Cooler found on this page:

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/acatalog/Zalman_CPU_Coolers.html

Only drawback is that as the fan is 120mm and the heatsink goes up around it is that it requires a large amount of space away from other components on the mobo. Makes it nice and quiet though!

1982

yeah the Zalman coolers are rated quite highly but i have the silentium T1 case so went with artic cooling alpine 64 and threw in a Mitsumi 7 in 1 card and floppy drive just to make use of the postage. Ok in reviews it only performs marginally better than the stock cooler but it is by far the quietest one available without going into the realms of passive cooling and i cant see myself ever having a real need to overclock a 4000 chip and need a high end cooler.
But thanks to all that contributed... this upgrade should keep me happy for another 2 years