The Athlon 64 3200+ and Testing Platforms
This content was originally featured on Amdmb.com and has been converted to PC Perspective’s website. Some color changes and flaws may appear.
On the top of it all, the Athlon 64 3200+ processor looks just like its brothers the Opteron and the Athlon 64 FX. On the opposite side you will see the defining difference, only 754 pins instead of 940.
How does this affect the processor? I’ll go ahead and reuse a table from my Athlon 64 FX-51 review to show you.
You can clearly see now that the Athlon 64 3200+ processor is lesser than the Athlon 64 FX by the means of the memory controller (64-bit single-channel instead of dual-channel). Other than that, the lack of a need for Registered memory is definitely considered a positive.
The only other catch: the Athlon XP 3200+ is running at 2.0 GHz while the Athlon 64 FX-51 runs at 2.2 GHz.
The prices of the Athlon 64 3200+ is looking to be right around $410 compared to the Athlon FX’s $725.
The Athlon 64 processor also has the benefit of competition amoung motherboard chipsets and vendors – this means a wider selection of products for consumers. For this review I have a VIA K8T800 chipset motherboard from MSI to test on (don’t worry, I will be doing a full review on the MSI K8T Neo motherboard and other K8T800 boards when I return from Computex). For now, we are using it basically as a VIA reference board.
The system configurations for these benchmarks are identical to those in the Athlon 64 FX-51 review where possible. Obviously the motherboard and processor must change, and we reverted to using Corsair memory for better timings.
| CPU | 1 x Athlon 64 3200+ GHz @ 2.0 GHz |
| Motherboards | MSI K8T Neo K8T800 Motherboard |
| Chipset Drivers | VIA Hyperion 4.49 |
| Memory | 2 x 512MB Corsair Micro DDR DRAM |
| Hard Drive | 80 GB 7200 RPM IBM EIDE |
| Video Card | NVIDIA GeForce FX 5900 Ultra |
| Video Drivers | Detonator 51.75 |
| Operating System | Windows XP w/ Service Pack 1 |
| CPU | 1 x Intel P4 3.2 GHz |
| Motherboards | Chaintech 9CJS 875 Canterwood |
| Chipset Drivers | Intel INF 1003 |
| Memory | 2 x 512MB Corsair Micro DDR DRAM |
| Hard Drive | 80 GB 7200 RPM IBM EIDE |
| Video Card | NVIDIA GeForce FX 5900 Ultra |
| Video Drivers | Detonator 51.75 |
| Operating System | Windows XP w/ Service Pack 1 |
| CPU | 1 x Athlon XP 3200+ GHz @ 2.2 GHz |
| Motherboards | Abit NF7-S nForce2 Ultra 400 |
| Chipset Drivers | NVIDIA Platform 2.65 |
| Memory | 2 x 512MB Corsair Micro DDR DRAM |
| Hard Drive | 80 GB 7200 RPM IBM EIDE |
| Video Card | NVIDIA GeForce FX 5900 Ultra |
| Video Drivers | Detonator 51.75 |
| Operating System | Windows XP w/ Service Pack 1 |
