First of all I'm a newbie to this forum, first time post. I've been playing around with some old PC's getting the hang of how they work, and don't have to worry if they don't work again.lol. But now I've stepped up a wee little bit, thus a few questions.

First of all, I've inherited a Compaq Presario SR1215CL from a source who thought they could do some upgrades, but screwed it up. I've got it back to proper operations, after installing a new hardrive. Here's one of the problems; HP/Compaq says there is an Athlon XP 3200+ installed, the device manager says it is a Sempron 3000+. Rated at 2.0Ghz, 512MB ram. I can believe this, as it was purchased from Tigerdirect as refurbished. My questions are; Which is better? (both were out around the same time). Can the Sempron be overclocked?

I've also been told that upgrading the video card can become a nightmare. I already know PCI express can't work. I looking into adding an AGP card, preferably the ATI Radeon X1600 Pro / 512MB GDDR2 / AGP 8x / DVI / VGA / TV Out / Video Card. Possibly the ATI Radeon X1650 Pro / 512MB GDDR2 / AGP 8x / DVI / VGA / HDTV / Video Card. Are there any known compatibility issues? If so, what card will work? I'm trying to stay around the $200.00 range. I do some gaming, mainly Halo (this card seems more than enough) and I will be using a 20+ inch LCD TV/monitor. I use this as a PC monitor and for TV.

I would really appreciate some help. I don't usually bother with these forums, but I've been reading this forum for a couple of months, and received some pretty good info. I figured I would join, and help also in what little I can.

The sempron runs at 12x166; the xp3200 11x200~2.2GHz.

So the xp3200 performs better. The sempron's performance is between that of a barton xp2600 (11.5x1666) and an xp2800(12.5x166).

Whether it's overclockable depends on the motherboard and memory as well as the processor.

The first thing I'd do is upgrade the power supply if you're going to make hardware changes.

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MSI K7N2 Delta2 LSR|35w XP-M2400 11x214 1.62V|2x512MB OCZ EL 2 2 2 11 2.9V|9600XT|Seasonic 350w
Abit AN7|XP-M2800 10.5x227 1.62V|2x512MB Mushkin XP4000 2 3 2 11 3.2V|9600XT|Seasonic 550w
Asus A7V600|XP-M2600 6-11x202 1.6V|2x512 Crucial PC3200 2.5 3 3 9 2.7V|PCI 32MB gfx|Corsair 450w