Product Reviews

It's usual for processor manufacturers to release faster and faster variants of a line, but AMD seems to be going in reverse with its Athlon 64 X2 products. After launching the 4800+, AMD then released slower versions, including the 4200+. Now it's the turn of the 3800+.

It's a Socket 939 processor and should work on all existing 939 motherboards, although some will require a BIOS upgrade first. As with all other dual-core processors, the X2 3800+ has two cores, each running at 2.0GHz. This is similar to building a PC that uses two Athlon 64 3200+ processors.

Performance is complicated as dual-core processors come into their own only when multitasking or running applications written to take advantage of multiple cores. These

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applications are known as multithreaded and work by running each task within a program independently, rather than single-threaded applications, which have to run tasks in order. So, a multithreaded video-editing application can apply two effects at once. This is clear from our Shopper application benchmarks result. Its overall score of 159 is one of the highest we've seen, but it's helped a lot by the video-encoding test, which is multithreaded.

We also tried running two applications at once to see how it copes with multitasking. It scored 5,645 in PCMark04 and also managed to encode 15 per cent of a video. This compares well to the Athlon 64 X2 4800+, which scored 6,162 in PCMark04 and encoded 20 per cent of the video. Single-core processors generally do well at only a single task, as they have one processor core for two applications; dual-cores can dedicate one core to each application, getting good results in both.

The Athlon 64 X2 3800+ is very good value for new technology and costs around the same as the single-core Athlon 64 4000+. If you run a lot of multithreaded applications or you often multitask, it's excellent value and will get better as more applications are developed for it. Those looking for a powerful processor for today, though, should spend the money on a fast single-core processor instead.