I am thinking about building a new system for myself and have narrowed it down to the following two Athlon CPUs. Athlon 64 X2 4400+ Athlon 64 X2 4200+ But I am unable to decide between the two. The types of cores, sockets, power rating, etc.. makes me heady. The AMD website isn't much useful in providing clear information either. Could you anyone just tell me which version/model of which one of these two processors is the better choice - in terms of general performance and throughput ? Thanks!

There is so little difference between the two that it makes little difference in real-time use. The 4400 has slightly more CPU speed, but they both have 512 L2 cache divided between them. If you are not going to be doing heavy video editing, graphic work or extreme gaming this isn't a bad price for a medium-power chip. Newegg has them for $85. If you have the money, one of the hottest chips you can lay your hands on is the AMD X2 6000, 3.0GHz twin 1meg L2 caches. $170 free shipping. Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime; Then industry pollutes the water and kills all the fish.

What CPU socket does your motherboard have? You can't install a socket AM2 CPU in a socket 939 board, & vice versa. If you don't have a board yet, you'll have to make that decision 1st (or at least the socket type). Once you've done that, you can search for a CPU in your price range. There are a few different cores, plus there's wattage & stepping to consider too. AFAIK, the Brisbane core is the newest. Lower wattage is *usually* better (more efficient), higher stepping is *usually* better (lastest core revision). For example, if you have a choice between two 5000+ CPUs & one is 89W w/F2 stepping & the other is 65W w/F3 stepping, go with the 65W. The higher end AM2 CPUs (6000+ & up) run at 125W, so if you go that route, take that into consideration when making your PSU choice. This should help you to narrow things down: http://products.amd.com/en-us/Deskt...

I think I might go with a 4400+ Windsor stricly based on what I am reading. This would be on a new board. I was thinking AM2 so I can keep DDR2 option open. Besides that, the Windsor has 1MB L2 cache instead of 512KB for the other cores. So that just leaves 4400+ Windsor as the only option. I started with the CPU so that I can first determine the price-performance sweet spot and then determine what socket boards I need. Hope thats a good way of doing it, if not better. So what boards would be good to consider ?

The larger L2 cache doesn't add as much performance as thought. If you look at this table, you'll see the 4400+ Brisbane w/2 x 512k L2 beats the 4400+ Windsor w/2 x 1024k L2 in almost ALL the benchmark tests: http://www23.tomshardware.com/cpu_2...

L2 cache like jam said doesn't automaticly give you better performance unless there is a large amount of data that is being transmitted from the processor chip into main memory.

Thanks for the great link to TH. Before that I was just digging thru pages & pages of benchmarks and reviews. The price-performance index (50% game 50% apps) was also a good one. Ok, so I think it will be a brisbane then. NE has some combo deals on it but I am not quite excited about the board/psu they include on that one. It looks like I am headed into the direction of an ASUS or Abit. I really want something that will allow me to play around with a lot of settings. I dont intend to seriously overclock it or anything but I'd like to have something highly configurable.