I think I may do a little upgrading of my PC but I need a little advice from people in the know.
I have a “A8AE-LE (AmberineM)†mobo that came with an AMD Athlon 64 3500+ CPU. My question is…if I drop an AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ into it, will I get much of performance boost? I’m only thinking about the Athlon 64 X2 3800+ because it’s cheap and I don’t really know what better Athlon 64 X2 processors the mobo can handle.
Take a look at tomshardware cpu comparison chart and it will give you a good idea of performance boost.
You may require a BIOS update to handle x2, do some research and see if others have reported issues. Your board will take any socket 939 chip, and these are all priced very nice right now. I run a Toledo 4800 X2 and it rocks.
Any Athlon x2 will kick the pants off your 3500, you will be amazed at the difference when you are doing some heavy task and trying to multitask too.
Also suggest looking into the Opterons, I think they get a lot of praise for their value vs performance. Although if you don’t OC, it might not make much difference. If you do a lot of video work, extra L2 cache (2x1MB) is a good choice.
what all do you use this comp for? what are the other specs?
this will help determine if a DC is a worthwhile upgrade or if there is something else that is holding your system back 
in that case, a 3800 would be nearly double the performance in threaded apps, but ~10% slower with non threaded apps (although you would have a free core to run other stuff on), Its too bad your board doesn’t have any OC options 
I found one -----> AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+ Toledo 2.4GHz 2 x 1MB L2 Cache Socket 939 Processor
Edit: Out Of Stock
Nonsense. A x2 is faster for ALL applications. Single threaded apps will run anywhere from 10% to 25% faster on average, depending on the way the app is coded and the nature of the work. Multi-threaded apps will run much faster of course.
NewEgg still has the Toledos showing, so there’s some hope they will get more. Usually they take them off the pages if there’s no more in the pipeline.
For a bargain, I’d be looking at the Opterons.
clock for clock the x2 may run single threaded apps just slightly (<1%) faster than a single core because all the back ground processes will be pushed to the second core, but the 3800 has 10% less clockspeed than the 3500. true single threaded apps are exactly the same speed on my fx-60 as they were on my 3700@2.6ghz, anything that uses more than 50% in task manager on a DC rig is not truly single threaded
