Earlier this year, I looked at MD’s dual-core Athlon 64 X2 4800+ (August CPU, page 25). Despite it coming out top dog in almost every benchmark I threw at it, the $900-plus price tag didn’t exactly make me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. I also wished for a lowercost,entry-level dual-core option.Consequently, in an attempt to bring dual-core X2s to the masses, AMD has decided to release its new Athlon 64 X2 3800+. The chip runs at 2GHz and has half the L2 cache at 512KB.In order to introduce this dual-core technology at such an affordable price,AMD had to cut some corners. First off,the core is based upon the Manchestercore.
With a smaller cache and die size,and fewer transistors,the Manchester core at 154 million transistors and 147mm² die size is smaller, cooler, and cheaper to make.
AMD even states that the max thermal power of the X2 has been reduced to 89W for the 3800+, which bodes well for some overclocking. With just a mild heatsink/fan combo, I hit 2.5GHz with relative stability. However,others have managed to go another 200MHz higher. As with previous CPUs, this X2 is also based on a socket 939 package, so your existing Athlon platform should work with a mild BIOS update.
From the benchmarks you can see that the X2 3800+ really put on a great fight.It easily outmatched the Intel 2.8GHz Pentium D 820 and did A-OK in the gaming tests to boot. Yes, its 2GHz clock speed is a bit on the slow side but even single-threaded applications seem to perform just fine. At the $354 price level it almost seems right for people to sway from getting single-core processors now.It’s more than acceptable in terms of gaming performance, so I feel comfortable recommending the X2 3800+.
With a smaller cache and die size,and fewer transistors,the Manchester core at 154 million transistors and 147mm² die size is smaller, cooler, and cheaper to make.
AMD even states that the max thermal power of the X2 has been reduced to 89W for the 3800+, which bodes well for some overclocking. With just a mild heatsink/fan combo, I hit 2.5GHz with relative stability. However,others have managed to go another 200MHz higher. As with previous CPUs, this X2 is also based on a socket 939 package, so your existing Athlon platform should work with a mild BIOS update.
From the benchmarks you can see that the X2 3800+ really put on a great fight.It easily outmatched the Intel 2.8GHz Pentium D 820 and did A-OK in the gaming tests to boot. Yes, its 2GHz clock speed is a bit on the slow side but even single-threaded applications seem to perform just fine. At the $354 price level it almost seems right for people to sway from getting single-core processors now.It’s more than acceptable in terms of gaming performance, so I feel comfortable recommending the X2 3800+.
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