HiI'm in the stages of upgrading my computer, and I've got my eyes fixed on the Athlon 64 series. I'm currently running an Athlon 2100xp, that is 2 yrs old, and I'm wondering would I see a noticable improvement if I upgraded to an Athlon 64 3000?I'm a novice when it comes to CPUs. The old Athlon 2100XP is 1.7ghz and the new on is 2.2ghz, this doesn't seem much of an improvement to me, but I believe it's the FSB that makes the overall difference, if I'm correct?I think the Athlon 2100 has a FSB of 133 compared to the 333 from the Athlon 64.CheersWill

Hey Will,I have been well pleased with my AMD64 3000, ASUS K8V and Corsair combo. Moved up from a 2700+. I am using them with an ATI 9800 Pro and there has been significant improvement in rame rate and smoothness. Well worth the money in my book.Good Luck!!Bob C.

"I'm wondering would I see a noticable improvement if I upgraded to an Athlon 64 3000?"Definitely.I saw a big difference when upgrading from a 1900+ to a 2400+ and then again when I overclocked the 2400+ to 2800+ (2.2 GHz and 366 MHz DDR FSB) speeds.The improvement of the 3000+ over the 2100+ should be very noticable."The old Athlon 2100XP is 1.7ghz and the new on is 2.2ghz, this doesn't seem much of an improvement to me, but I believe it's the FSB that makes the overall difference, if I'm correct?"There are many factors that determine the overall speed of the system.The FSB makes some difference. The speed of the RAM also makes a difference.The internal design of the CPU makes a very big difference. Some CPUs are more efficent and don't need to run at a very high frequency (MHz). They do a lot of work per clock cycle. Others are designed to work at much higher freq's and don't do as much work per clock cycle. For example, the 2.2 GHz Athlon64 and the 3 GHz Pentium4 have similar performance. A 2.2 GHz P4 on the other hand, is more comparable to your current 1.7 GHz AthlonXP.The Athlon64 is faster per MHz than the older AthlonXP's and significantly faster, per MHz, than the Pentium4. An Athlon64 running at 1.7 GHz would be much faster than an AthlonXP at 1.7 GHz.