I am interested in buying a new processor for a computer build. I'm not a gamer and use FS2004 on occasion. I plan on going with an AMD Athlon as I purchased an Asus motherboard on a sale recently. The two processors I am considering are both socket 939:3800 Venice w/512 cache.3700 San Diego w/1 meg cache.I have not been able to find much info as to how much L2 cache figures in to the playability of ms flight sims.Would 200 mhz on the 3800 be preferable to the additional 512 cache? I also want to "recycle" 4 sticks of Kingston 3200 ram and I understand there are some issues on the memory controllers of some AMD processors which don't allow the use of 4 sticks of memory at one time without dropping the speed down to ddr333 from ddr400.I plan on pairing this with a 7600gs pci-e.Thanks for the input.Sorry, I believe this should have been posted in the hardware forum which I just saw.

I think there would be neglible performance difference between the two processors with FS.I recently had the chance to try out 4 sticks of 512M memory in my A64 system and, as you say, had to drop my memory speed to DDR333 to get it to work. There was negligible performance impact on FS9 from reducing the memory speed.Gary

I wasn't aware of having to drop the memory to 333. I looked up some info online and this is what I came accross: As you can see from Table 2, Socket 939 models (3500+, 3800+, and 4000+) are better choices than Socket 754 models because they include a dual-channel memory controller and faster HyperTransport performance. Dual-channel memory controllers provide faster performance because they access a pair of matched memory modules (same size, speed, and latency) as a single unit. The faster performance that dual-channel memory and the faster chipset connection offer is the reason for the improved rating model numbers in the 3800+ and 4000+ versus the 3700+, all of which run at 2.4GHz.Here is the link: http://www.quepublishing.com/articles/arti...0&seqNum=2&rl=1The way I read it is that with the 3700,3800, and 4000 it treats two sticks as one and therefore there is no need to drop the speed.Make sense? If I'm not correct please respond as I have a 3500+ VeniceCraig

Both of those cpu's will perform about the same in FS. The 3700+ is a San Diego core which I have found to be a little better overclocker than a Venice core, but that may not be a consideration for you.The 3700+'s are actually slightly cheaper too.RhettAMD 3700+, eVGA 7800GT 256, ASUS A8N-E, PC Power 510 SLI, 2 GB Corsair XMS 3-3-3-8, etc. etc.

This article must have been written before the 3200+ and 3000+ socket 939 CPUs came out. I believe that the dual-channel memory controller capability is in all socket 939 A64s. In any case, I only changed my memory speed with 4 sticks to 333 because I had to - my PC wouldn't even post at 400! From what I read on other hardware forums, this is a "feature" of my ASUS A8V motherboard rather than the CPU.Gary