Date:
Tuesday , January 06, 2004
Author:
Kyle Bennett
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Athlon64 3400+

We pit the A64-3000+, 3200+, 3400+, AFX-51, P4 3.2GHz, P4EE 3.2GHz, and AthlonXP 3200+ head to head.

AMD is launching a faster Athlon64 today that will be labeled the 3400+. AMD has done us proud in that this is as far from a paper launch as you can get, as Athlon64 3400+ CPUs are already in stock and for sale. AMD is listing their price for the CPU at US$417 each in lots of 1,000, and at the link above you will see the CPU selling at ZipZoomFly for $440. It will be interesting to see where the price and availability go from here as it is currently anyone's guess.

The Athlon64 3400+ is clocked at 2.2GHz (11x200) and has 1MB of L2 cache. It is in a 754-pin package and is supported by a single channel of DDR400 memory.

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The Athlon64 has support for future 64-bit enabled operating systems as many of you already know. In true HardOCP form we are not here to bore you today with tons of regurgitated information. Our original Athlon64/AthlonFX article is here for your reference should you have any questions beyond what we cover today.

Testing Comparisons

As usual we wanted the benchmarks to do most of the talking and we have a firm set that I think most of you will find complete without dragging on for 15 pages. There are however some things we need to discuss about our comparisons as all CPUs are not created equal.

Big Money CPUs

You will see that we grouped the AthlonFX-51 and Pentium 4 Extreme Edition together, away from the rest of the pack. Both of these CPUs are extremely expensive by enthusiast standards and are not manufactured in large quantity by either company. They are the flagship CPUs that are meant to win awards and not really appeal to the mass market.

The P4EE 3.2GHz CPU retails for right under US$1000 while the AthlonFX-51 retails for about US$750. While these will be fun numbers to compare, certainly these CPUs will not find their homes in our boxes, at least not until we see several more CPU launches drive their prices down.

Mainstream Money CPUs

Our other CPUs range from inexpensive to not-so-cheap. The A64 3400+ is about US$440 as discussed above. The A64 3200+ is still weighing in at a healthy US$415 (dropping to US$278 today). All the while the AthlonXP 3200+ is at US$322. Our Pentium 4 3.2GHz CPU is retailing for about US$400. If you guys are like me, then none of these prices hardly seem a bargain and surely many of us are eeking out great clock speeds on inexpensive 2500+ CPUs and 2.4Cs now days.

The CPU that is really going to be on trial here, and likely steal a bit of the 3400+'s thunder is the Athlon64 3000+ that we saw soft-launched last month. It is a bit different from our other Athlon64 CPUs though. The Athlon64 3000+ can be had for about US$240 and can be found in stock throughout North America. Cost is not the only thing that separates it from the others. It shares the same clock speed with the Athlon64 3200+ (2GHz - 10x200), but its L2 cache has been sliced down to 512KB from the 3400+'s 1MB. Finally, we have a blue collar Athlon64 and this is something that many of us have been waiting for.

(ZipZoomFly was used for all the above pricing.)

Mainboard Selection

As for our selection of mainboards, we went with what we saw to be the popular platforms for the Athlon64 and AthlonFX. We used the VIA based K8T800 K8T Neo board from MSI for our 754-pin A64 solution and the Asus nForce3 based SK8N for our 940-pin AFX solution. So this in a way gives us a great VIA Vs. NVIDIA contest that is very interesting to say the least. For our Intel solution we decided to use Intel's own i875 mainboard.