AMD Athlon 64 3000+ / 2 GHz

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 ...

The AMD 64 has been out a while now, it's a shame that more hasn't been done with this technology. The model I am reviewing has a 1MB cache - there doesn't seem to be a category here for that - everything I say should qualify for both models, although there maybe a drop in performance on the 512Kb cache version. Even 512Kb is a decent amount of cache memory though. To explain briefly, when people refer to 'bits' in this context, they're referring to how much information the chip can deal with at any one time - 64 bits is better than 32 because more data is being dealt with in one go. (Ok, I know that's really abstracting it all you geeks out there, but I'm ...

I could bore you with technical specifications but that information is available in great detail everywhere. Suffice to say that this CPU will support the 64 bit operating systems when they eventually come out, and performs really well as it has a lot of cache and a 400mhz FSB with HyperThreading. The price point will attract most people. Don't go for the most expensive CPU on the market, these are priced much too high for the marginal performance gains you get. This chip runs at 2Ghz. To get a slightly faster chip running at 2.4Ghz let's say, you have to nearly double the price. Not worth it for a 20% increase in CPU speed, which only equates to a 10-15% ...