amd sempron or xp?

[dolittle]

hi, i am building a pc atm, and i am on a very tight budget. i am thinkin of buyin a pcchips motherboard and amp sempron 2200 chip, and 256mg mem. i will be using this machine for playing and making maps for css. allso i am a bit confused on wot grafix card to get? bare in mind i hav only £60 to spend on one
im not in2 makin a machine that will play all games cuz ive got so many projects i aint got time to play them. xp or sempron, will i really need that extra cache for mapping, or will i b ok? not to worryed bowt the memory cuz i cud allways upgade at later date wen ive got more monza. if anyone can help on this matter i would b very greatfull...........

 

[WaryWolf]

the extra cache may make a bit of difference, so you may want to buy the equivalent athlon xp chip instead of a sempron. the cheapest athlon xp 2200+ i could find was £42 but the sempron was £31. i'd still recommend you get an athlon, but you might not notice the difference unless you have a lot of applications open at once.



for the graphics card: you could get a radeon 9600 pro here for £65-70. it should handle hl2/cs:s fine.

for £5-10 less, you could probably find a geforce FX 5600, but the FX series of cards aren't too good with directx9 and i wouldn't recommend you get one of those.

 

[dolittle]

tah, will get the radeon 9600 pro , freand sugested it too. still not sure on cpu thow. thanxs for your help.

 

[Asus]

Cache might help a little but nothing major. I'd worry about clock speed more.
I'm pretty sure the Sempron 2200+ has 256KB for L2 cache. That's what a zipzoomfly has for the specs.

Here's a run down of where the Athlon XP's and Sempron's fit for specs.

Athlon XP 1800+ 1.53GHz 256KB L2 (266 FSB)
Sempron 2200+ 1.5GHz 256KB L2 (333 FSB)
Sempron 2300+ 1.58GHz 256KB L2 (333 FSB)
Athlon XP 2000+ 1.67GHz 256KB L2 (266 FSB)
Sempron 2400+ 1.67GHz 256KB L2 (333 FSB)
Sempron 2500+ 1.75GHz 256KB L2 (333 FSB)
Athlon XP 2200+ 1.8GHz 256KB L2 (266 FSB)
Sempron 2600+ 1.8GHz 256KB L2 (333 FSB)
Athlon XP 2400+ 2.0GHz 256KB L2 (266 FSB)
Athlon XP 2500+ 1.83GHz 512KB L2 (333 FSB)
Sempron 2800+ 2.0GHz 256KB L2 (333 FSB)
Athlon XP 2600+ 2.0GHz 256KB L2 (333 FSB)
Athlon XP 2600+ 1.9GHz 512KB L2 (333 FSB)
Athlon XP 2700+ 2.17GHz 256KB L2 (333 FSB)

 

[dolittle]

cheers m8, n1 sorted now. l8rs

 

[blackeye]

cache would be a big difference from all the complaints I have heard on newegg. People are saying the multi tasking sucks on semprons becasue of the smaller cache.

 

[Atari]

I'd recommend the normal XP too after reading the above m8y

 

[dolittle]

yeah well, i have no choice

 

[Asus]

I generally don't pay too much attention to technical items from posts on Newegg. I do for cases and other things though.

In a number of benchmarks clock speed can make a big difference just like FSB or Cache as a 2400+ a lot of times performs similar to a 2500+. Although in more media applications the higher 333 FSB is favored (which the Sempron has amazingly).