Lightning fast with a variety of applications, fantastic price, good package
Disadvantages:
Runs a bit hot, not much 64 - bit software yet .
Recommend to potential buyers:
yes
Full review
THE CHOICE
I recently decided it was time to finally give my ancient Athlon 500-based system a rest and build a new one (on a budget of around £400). Obviously the CPU is a fairly important choice to make when building a new computer so I put in a lot of thought and research and eventually settled on the AMD Athlon64 3000+ for my new machine. The current price of the 3000+ model makes it only slightly more expensive than the 2800+ and actually cheaper than the equivalent AthlonXP! There's no Intel processor available that can touch it at this price. I paid around £95 for the P-I-B (Processor-In-Box) package, which includes everything you need.
The Athlon64 comes in various varieties, 754pin, 939pin, FX and a range of speeds, all of which have slight differences and may require different motherboards. The 3000+ I chose is a 754pin processor (at the budget end of the scale) with 128kb L1 cache, 512kb L2 cache and actual clock speed of just over 2 GHz. AMD use an equivalent performance marking system to rate their processor speeds – so whilst the clock speed of this ‘3000+’ chip is 2ghz, its performance is equivalent to at least a 3ghz Pentium 4 – a common misconception is that clock speed (the ghz/mhz number) is the be all and end all of a processor – most certainly not the case.
INSTALLATION
The retail pack comes in a very nice looking box complete with instructions, heatsink/fan and the processor itself. For the extra couple of quid over the OEM processor, this package is really worth it, mostly for the 3 year warranty that’s also included. The diagrammatical instructions aren't perfect but fitting the CPU is a doddle really, just lift the lever on your motherboard, drop it into the socket with the corners matching, and push the lever down to slot it in, voila!
I put some extra Antec thermal grease on the heatsink before fitting (as I’d heard this would help with heat transfer from the chip to the cooler); though I'm not sure I spread it around enough to be honest. I found fitting the heatsink/fan a little confusing (instructions not much help there) but got there in the end. The system booted first time, but does seem to be running a little hot – between 50 and 60C - is this normal for the Athlon64 or have I done something wrong? I'd like to experiment with overclocking the CPU but with it already at this temp I'm not sure it's a great idea.
PERFORMANCE
My new system (Abit NF8, 512mb Crucial DDR400, 120GB Seagate ATA133, Radeon 9550 256mb) installed Windows XP in about 10-15mins and boots in about 15-20s. I currently get just over 10000 on 3DMark01 but am sure this would rocket with a better graphics card.
The chip handles processor-intensive jobs such as audio/video encoding well, and is superb at multi-tasking as long as there’s nothing too complicated going on (though more RAM would improve this).
Having used various other computers but nothing as powerful as this, I was amazed by the instancy and responsiveness of everything I do; it really is noticeably faster, I'm sure this wonderful processor is at least partly responsible for this. Programs install in seconds, not minutes and I can finally run all the games and programs I want. Admittedly, I'm not running any 64-bit software at the moment and doubt I will be for a year or two but it's nice to know I'm future-proofed to a degree.
CONCLUSION
So overall, top marks for the Athlon64 3000+, at this price it's the obvious choice for any budget/mid-range machine. Just the one niggle and that's the high temperature - if anyone has any ideas how to get this down a bit (if it's out of the ordinary that is, without ridiculously expensive cooling systems) please do let me know. Cheers, Tom.
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Stability
Very stable
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