Can anyone help me please? Onefor the tekheads. I'm looking to upgrade my processor on a socket 754 mobo, but I can't decide which one. I gather that the slower 3400 with the Newcastle core may be faster than the faster 3700 with the older Clawhammer core even though it has 1mb of L2 cache onboard.Can anyone advise me please?http://www.precisionmanuals.com/images/forum/ng_driver.jpghttp://www.precisionmanuals.com/images/forum/747400.jpgSemper en excretum, solo profundum variat!

Don't know about the processors, but if was me I'd look at socket 939. Socket 754 is pretty much a dead-end platform. You can get comparable speed processors for the 939 for the same price, and socket 939 is much more upgradeable. The dual-core AMD 64's use the socket 939 platform, and most, if not all, existing 939 motherboards can run them, although they may need a BIOS update.

Just save your money so you can then get a S939 mobo and CPU, will allow for a lot more upgrades later on. Though if really do not want to do that, I would just go for 3400+, the extra cache will not make a huge difference and I believe they are both 2.2GHZ

Go to www.tomshardware.com nice cpu charts with benchmarks...Both 3700+ and 3400+ 754 out performs the dual memory ones 939 except 3800+ and higher...In most of the benchesmarks the newcastle 3400 CPU performs great and almost the same as the 3500+ 939As for the 3700+ just installed so after my reinstall of FS and that will 2 days hehehehe we are going to bench that one...Here in the Netherlands the 3700+ is around the 220 euro... so interresting...I personally don't care about only upgrading the CPU i always do mobo/cpu/memorySucces with your choice

o and the 3700+ is at 2,4ghz and 1mb L2 cache :-)

Sure, the 754 socket might be not the latest socket, but there is no proven performance gain of switching to a 939 socket. Bottom line is that 754 mainboards are nowadays cheaper and the Newcastle core is just fine and comparable to the (much more expensive) Clawhammer. At least you won't see a whole lot of FPS improvements, not in FS9. If you upgrade in a year to a new CPU then you'll most likely want a new mainboard anyway, because by then 939 will be dated.I just picked up a 3200+ 747 Newcastle OEM for $130 - you really can't beat that.

Where did you find this deal? Does it include the fan?Thanks,Thomas

It's a chain called Microcenter (www.microcenter.com) - it is 'just' the processor (OEM), still a bargain (the cheapest boxed version was $199 online). Well, I got a nice Thermaltake cooler/fan and it was a total of $160. Still not too bad.