Sempron Fan for Athlon XP 3000+

Hi,

I'm doing a piecemeal upgrade of my PC which I mostly use for gaming (EVE Online, Civilization 4, Medieval: Total War).

It's a Sempron 2400 with an AsRock K7S7GX motherboard, 2GB of RAM, nVidia 7600GT and 2 IDE hard disk drives.

It's a Socket A/462 motherboard which supports FSB 200/266/333 MHz. Since I'm not upgrading the mobo I am looking at upgrading the CPU instead. This would probably be an Athlon 3000+ FSB333 which I understand is the fastest that will run with this socket and FSB speed. Most likely I'd get a system pull from eBay which won't come with a fan or thermal compound.

I have a few questions about this:

• Will this Athlon give me much of a performance boost over the Sempron?

• Will the stock fan that came with the Sempron be OK with the Athlon or should I upgrade that too?

• Is Thermalright Chill Factor Thermal Compound a good product to use? (I got a tube of this when I ordered the graphics card two weeks ago)

• Are there any other snags or banana skins I should beware of?

Thanks for your help,

Ciarán

The athlon will be faster, it runs at 2.16 ghz vs 1.67ghz for the Sempron. The athlon also has double the cache of the sempron (512 vs 256mb). Not sure about the fan, it would probably work?
The thermal compound would be fine.

A quick scan of ebay shows that 3000+ xp's are commonly selling for $70-80. For $85 or so you could get an Athlon 64 x2 3800+ and a new socket am2 motherboard with an agp slot for your graphics card. Add $40 for 2gb of ddr2 ram and you've absolutely obliterated your proposed PC for only $50 or so extra. Or get a mobo with pci-e and drop $100 on an 8600gt for even more performance and upgradability. You could probably even ebay the 7600gt and your ram to offset a good part of the cost.

There comes a time when it's just cheaper and easier to get new stuff, and I think you're getting close to it. If the existing mobo has sentimental value or something though, your proposed upgrade will work.