Yes, the Sempron 64 would show a noticeable gain; irregardless of the 64 bit-ness, the AMD cores are simply better designed, with shorter execution pipelines than anything Intel has on the market at this time. As well as the better thermal characteristics and lower power consumption (plus AMD hasn't dropped the ATX mobo format for BTX. A new Intel board and chip would just about require you to scrap your old case for a new one). And you would have some upgrade path in the future, by being able to run XP-64 or Vista when it comes out.

The DDR-400 will also show some improvement. Just be careful of the memory you buy. Kingston Valueram is the cheapest I would use, and I would recommend Crucial or above.

You might want to poke around on pricewatch.com though. If you can swing a socket 939 mobo and an Athlon 64 3000+ (making sure the board can be upgrade to the X2's with a BIOS flash), you would be set for some time. And the dual channel memory access is even better than the old Athlon 64's single channel (which is what the 'Sempron 64' really is; the socket 754 Athlon 64 with a slightly smaller L2 cache).

Message edited on: 09/29/2005 06:13