Will an AMD Athlon Sempron 2600+ do the trick for fairly old games with a GeForce MX440?

How old?

Far Cry is "old" to some people and your system would not be able to play that very well. If you plan on playing games such as Halo and other "old" games then get a better graphics card. At least a Radeon 5700 or a Radeon 9600.

First, to correct, an AMD Athlon and an AMD Sempron are two different processors. Im assuming your asking about the Sempron. Overall, the Sempron was not made to game in any terms, similar to the old Duron processors. Their speed matches an Athlon XP's closely, also somewhere slower to comparable models, the Semprons are basically downgraded Athlon XP's, with slower FSBs and smaller cache sizes. However, I have seen decent (not great, not excellent) performance on games such as Brothers in Arms , Doom 3, Half Life 2, on a Sempron 2600+ Socket A type, with 256MB DDR SDRAM PC3200, an ATI Radeon 9200SE 128MB 8x AGP, and a 7200RPM 80GB ATA133 Harddrive. Now, Im sure the graphics card will boast a large amount of the 'decent' performance shown to me personally, but the Sempron will game when forced to, I just recommend getting a better processor if your going to play games that are about a year or so old or earlier. Any older, and it should only be mainly dependant on the type and speed of graphics card you have. If you can spend a little extra cash, I recommend going with the Athlon XP processors as a first resort, and if you plan to game with today's advanced games, and 'tommorow's' even more advanced games, please stick with an Athlon 64 processor. Hope this clarifies everything! Jayson "Don't let the Hammer hammer you in wolfenstein" - [-H@MM3R-]

Then again, if your going to game with old games like Doom 3D, Duke Nukem 3D, Dark Forces, Jedi Knight 2, Unreal Tourmanent Game of the Year Edition, then the Sempron should do just fine. "Don't let the Hammer hammer you in wolfenstein" - [-H@MM3R-]

The Sempron is a fine gaming CPU. FYI, it's basically an Athlon XP that's been reclocked to run at 166MHZ (333FSB). The Sempron 2600+ is just an Athlon XP 2200+ Tbred that's been altered to run at 11 x 166MHz. The MX440 is a bit dated, but the 9600SE isn't a good card either. It's an underclocked, 64-bit version of the plain vanilla 9600. Almost all SE cards suck...it's best to avoid them. Actually, I think the MX440 beats the 9600SE in most benchtests. http://graphics.tomshardware.com/graphic/20031229/vga-charts-03.html#unreal_tournament_2003