Athlon 64 2800+ vs. 64 3000+

Hey all, I'm hew here and this is my first post. What I've read so far throughout all the forums here have been incredibly helpful, but I still have a question regarding the Athlon 64s.

I'm on an incredibly tight budget, and I'm looking to build a PC with a 64. The 3200+ isn't an option because it's too expensive. Ideally, the 2800+ is what I'd get, but if the performance and overclocking ability difference between the 2800+ and 3000+ is enough, I suppose I'd be able to squeeze that in instead.

So that's my question, is the 3000+ really that big of a difference from the 2800+ (or is it nothing a little overclocking can't even out...?), and how overclockable are the two chips?

Thanks!

Welcome to the forums!

I wish I could tell you something about the 2800+, but I've never seen anyone actually have one in my life. Everyone opts for the 3000+ or higher. You'd have a 9x multi max, but that's not a big issue. The potential problem is that the 2800+'s could very well contain the lower batch and not overclock too well at all, but there isn't any hard data supporting this, so they could turn out pretty good. If you're feeling gutsy, the mobile 2800+ could end up better than both. It defaults at 1.6GHz, but with very low voltage, hinting at good overclockability. It also has 1mb of L2 cache, compared to the 512k in the desktop.