Budget Gaming PC - Sempron vs Athlon 64 ?

What would you recommend for a good reliable budget gaming system?

Are the quicker Sempron's any good - or for gaming should you really get an Athlon 64 ?

Does much of it have to do with the graphics card? Would a Sempron with a Geforce 6600 or something similar perform ok at decent resolutions?

 

I made the mistake of buying a pc from a generic shop it had pretty high specs but used shit components, i find its the graphics card where they save on.

i dunno about the diference between a semperon and amd64 but a computer with a gig of ram or more an ok processor and a good graphics card such as the 6600/6800 should run most games at high res

 

Based on the price of Athlon 64's these days you are better with one of those.

One thing you have to look for with processors is the L2 / L3 (Level 2 / 3 Cache Size)...

Semprons and Intel Celerons from memory have 256kb of onchip cache whereas P4 / AMD 64 have either 1mb or 2mb of cache which greatly increase's the processing power, graphics and number crunching on the chip, make sure you dont cut yourself short for the sake of a few bucks as the cache size on the chip makes the difference when it comes to games etc.

I personally use Xeon chips which are meant for servers but I play games as well as work with large spreadsheets and math which means the 2mb cache on the chip plays an important role.

Watch what you are buying and check the fine print....

 

Thanks for the help guys, the Athlon 64 seems to be the way to go.