More Awesome Than You!

My husband has started thinking about letting me have a new cpu, I hear a lot of good things about the AMD Athlon 64 FX, but looking at one site it says 2000mhz, how can that be better than my current Athlon XP 3200 (2200mhz)?  The really technical stuff confuses me no end  ::)  He's looking at the AMD Athlon 64 3500+ (socket 939) for me, of course he knows as little as I do about performance differences.  Any opinions on this last cpu?

Any advice on this from the custom builders here?  My sims has become unbearably laggy since nightlife, before that I was playing with all settings high except AA, now I can't even keep it there because the lag is driving me crazy *grr!*  The plan is to upgrade the cpu, motherboard, upgrade to faster ram and get a decent video card.

I'm upgrading from:
Amd Athlon XP 3200+ (2.2ghz)
1024mb ddr (pc2700 2x512mb)
Geforce FX 5600 TD 256mb (Asus)
crappy AsRock motherboard

For the video I'm planning on making the leap to pci-express and changing from Nvidia to ATI but that won't be for a few months I should think.  For now we want to concentrate on getting the other core components (cpu/mobo first).  I want TS2 to run flawlessly with all options enabled.

Good luck. Might want to look into a super computer. :P

Honestly, the system you have doesn't sound half bad and most of what's out there now isn't going to be a humongous leap over that. You want my honest advice on getting it to run better? You won't like it, but don't play huge loads overloaded with crap and limit your downloads and choose them very carefully. Watch out for high poly objects and don't get a million skins and hair files because their textures are huge and take up a lot of space.

At the moment I only have the gameplay tweaks from here, no real custom content.  I am playing on the largest lot size, and do currently have 8 sims on it - it's a legacy lot.  I'm going to skip the cpu, this one has only been in for a few months but I am determined to upgrade the video card and ram, and the motherboard has to go because this one is 8xagp and I'm gunning for pci-express.  The trouble I'm having at the moment is finding a socket A motherboard with pci-express, all the ones at Asus seem to be Intel based  :(  He's getting the motherboard today so I'm trying to look them up online now, any suggestions on a good Socket A motherboard for Pci-E that we can buy in the UK would be more than welcome, it needs to support ddr 400 aswell.

*Edit*  I don't think Socket A motherboards have Pci-E, looks like I'll have to upgrade the cpu after all.

*Another Edit*

Change of plans again  ;D  We've been 'discussing' the cpu I'm going to have and have finally settled on this one:
http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/products/index.html?rb=13257994194&action=c2hvd19wcm9kdWN0X292ZXJ2aWV3&product_uid=63119
He says we can get it next week since the motherboard allowance falls slightly short of this cpu price, it's going to be tough waiting that long because until I get the first part I won't relax for fear he'll change his mind again lol.