Amd athlon, sempron, pentium4 etc.

[Apokalipse]

I wouldn't get the Sempron. They are pretty low performance compared to the Athlon chips. I'd say get either the Dual-core Athlon 3800+, or get the 3500+/3200+. The x2 3800+ is like 160$ now, marked down from 300$....real good buy.

not really. and I do own a Sempron (64)
the only difference is the amount of cache. and in gaming, most of the time it doesn't make much of a difference.

 

[JamezKangster]

not really. and I do own a Sempron (64)
the only difference is the amount of cache. and in gaming, most of the time it doesn't make much of a difference.

Well I got the amd athlon 64 3700 2.2ghz, and the cache for me makes a difference for gaming. I started out with a 128 cache celeron and to a 256 cache pentium 4, and now to a 1 mb cache athlon, I see alot of difference.

 

[Apokalipse]

the difference is affected a lot more by the architecture.
the AMD K8 CPU's FPU (Floating Point Unit) is a lot better than the Pentium 4's one.

games generally use a lot more floating point instructions than most other programs.

basically, the K8 CPU's FPU will process floating point instructions in a lot fewer clock cycles

*edit*
games are not heavily affected by cache. though complex mathematics does benefit a lot more from cache.

so if the program you're using tends to use mathematical instructions (using the CPU's Arithmetic Logic Unit), the cache will make a bigger difference.

 

[j12]

celeron=scaled down version of pentium 4, less l2 cache
sempron=scaled down of athlon, less l2 cache

 

[Apokalipse]

celeron=scaled down version of pentium 4, less l2 cache
sempron=scaled down of athlon, less l2 cache

the celeron is cut down on more than the cache. I can't remember exactly what else it's missing, but I think it might be some instruction sets that the Pentium 4 has.