Review: AMD Athlon XP 3200+

So what's it like overall? We talked about performance on the previous page. It's not as fast as new Intel gear but neither is it slow. I hinted that you should buy a lower clocked XP instead and make this processor essentially for nearly one tenth of the price. That's pretty staggering and yes this processor will be the wrong side of £400 at launch.

Not even Intel sells its fastest consumer processor over £400 any more. I can hear the "AMD is cheaper" camp crying into their cornflakes as I type this. However, can you get the performance of Intel's top consumer processor from one costing 1/10th the price? Not a chance. Do Intel sell a full cache processor for £45? Nah.

As a platform, I'm pretty impressed. 200MHz front side bus can't hurt and the DDR memory infrastructure has long been in place to support the move. nForce2 Ultra 400 takes things forward a little and provides a good home for the new CPU.

I'm also a convert to the Barton way of doing things, I like the 512KB L2 and technically I'm a big fan of the K7 architecture but that's a little too deep for this article.

It's been an article of highs and lows, good performance but not quite enough, performance that hints at things to come but performance that wont be here for a little while. It's hard to evaluate the expensive, nearly end of line models in a CPU range without feeling this way.

It's a shame it has to go back, I've quite enjoyed the testing. That testing included a little overclocking but not enough to warrant a page of its own. Without going into too much detail, the board and memory gave me a benchmarkable 2.4GHz at stock voltage (1.65V) and on the stock heatsink and heat was the problem before the board or memory had anything to say about it.

I was able to do air cooled benchmarks at 2.5GHz with assistance from a large 135cfm YS-Tech I had lying about, but nothing too stable. Not bad for the little Igloo cooler. Strap on something beefier and 2.5 air cooled should be fine.

On to the Pro's and Con's.

Pro's

Floating point performance
General performance overall
Increased bus speed for more I/O performance

Con's

Expensive
It makes me want an Opteron


Thanks

AMD for the sample, Theresa especially
Ray at Pathway for my Sapphire Atlantis Radeon 9700 Pro

Buy one here