Legit Reviews

I have a Newcastle 3000+ and I was wondering if it would really be worth it to upgrade to a 3500+ and how much of an improvement I'd see from the upgrade.

that really depends on your OC and if you are, also is it a skt754 or 939 newcastle.

If you on skt754 i dont think you will see much improvement over the mhz bump which should be good for 5-10% over your existing cpu.

If your on skt939 and you want to overclock then yes, because the new venice chips tend to OC to at least 2.5 and many go higher.

Depending on what you do with your system, there can be a nice little performance bump from the 400MHz increase in speed. Your best bet is to look up reviews of the 3500+ and weed out the ones that include a 3000+ in the benchmarks. For example:

SharkyExtreme 3500+ Review

As for being "worth it," that's very much subjective. Assuming this is a s939 platform we're dealing with and a halfway decent motherboard, I'd look at overclocking the difference and ride out the untapped performance that lies in that 3000+ processor. You could also consider investing in some Arctic Silver 5, a third party heatsink/fan, and some capable RAM to aid in this process, all of which could be transferred to a dual-core CPU upgrade down the line.