Affordable Dual Core from AMD: Athlon 64 X2 3800+
by Anand Lal Shimpi on August 1, 2005 9:36 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Final Words
There's not much to say here other than that the Athlon 64 X2 3800+ is the clear choice for any user at this price point. What you give up in single threaded performance is more than made up for by the improvements in multitasking and multithreaded application performance.Bit by bit, AMD is eating away at any possible recommendation that we'd have for the Pentium D. While the Pentium D 820 is still our recommendation at the sub-$300 mark, if your budget can handle it, we'd strongly recommend going for the Athlon 64 X2 3800+.
As for overclocking, we had no problems reaching 2.46GHz with our Athlon 64 3800+ sample using standard air cooling. The overclocking wasn't as impressive as what we saw with the Toledo based Athlon 64 4200+, but we will save a final conclusion on overclocking until we get more Manchester based processors in house.
We really didn't want to see AMD become a more expensive CPU manufacturer, and with the X2 3800+, we finally have a more sensibly priced dual core option. The choice is clear - the Athlon 64 X2 3800+ is better in every way than the Pentium D 830. For Intel's sake in the enthusiast community, Conroe had better be very competitive next year - because ever since Prescott, the Pentium 4 has been an utter disappointment.
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neogodless - Monday, August 1, 2005 - link
new comments system seems to hate Firefoxanyway, all the price links on the article point to the Athlon 64 3800+ rather than the X2...
bersl2 - Monday, August 1, 2005 - link
It WorksForMe(TM).neogodless - Tuesday, August 2, 2005 - link
Good for you... I simply cannot login/post comments while using firefox. It seems to accept the login, as it doesn't spit back an "invalid" message but shows me the login form again, and no links to "post" or "reply". Probably just a cookie issue but I tried turning my security down a little and it still didn't work... is Anandtech requiring a 3rd party cookie to be set just to post comments... ?neogodless - Wednesday, August 3, 2005 - link
Dang it...For a short while a month or so back, I was "approving" each cookie individually, and anandtech insisted on planting a cookie until I said "block site completely" - forgot about that until today. Finally able to post in Firefox now!
Staples - Monday, August 1, 2005 - link
It is an eyesore regardless. I am using FF and I have not tried it in IE.SpaceRanger - Monday, August 1, 2005 - link
Excellent Article. I'm glad that AMD is coming out with more affordable Dual-Core solutions.Marlin1975 - Monday, August 1, 2005 - link
To bad the 2 people listed for having "availability" in this peice are already marking them OVER retail price. Let the price gouging start... :(blkrde - Monday, August 1, 2005 - link
Lets hope the prices come down soon. I need one of these in my new build.neogodless - Wednesday, August 3, 2005 - link
Yeah I haven't upgraded my motherboard/CPU combo in 20 whole months!!Still stuck with a 754 Athlon 64 3000+
I figure the 3800+ is like two of those :)
And like two of those... it'll only increase performance for multi-tasking... but it's already plenty for all the single tasks I have.
Now I paid $215 then... so I guess $430 would be fair for one of these...