a great durable long lasting chip (AMD Athlon 64 4000+ / 2.4 GHz)

Member Name: gump103

Product:	AMD Athlon 64 4000+ / 2.4 GHz
Date:	03/07/09 (40 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: fast (at the time), good value, durable

Disadvantages: bit long in the tooth now compared to modern chips

Over the years I've owned a variety of processors, starting with an intel 486DX 33, followed by an amd k6-2 66 and then on into the pentium range. Out of them all this one has been the longest lasting one I've owned and as I packaged it up tonight following an upgrade to a dual core chip I thought I'd pop on and write a quick review.

I brought this in 2005 from Aria.co.uk in one of there Friday special sales for £100 which if I remember right was a good £20 less than anywhere else were selling them.

At 2.4ghz the processor was the fastest single core processor you could get on the socket 939 motherboards and as such I hoped it would have a bit more longetivety that the last few processors I owned before it. There is also an AM2 version of the processor which is clocked slightly higher at 2.6ghz. Compared with the fastest P4 processors at the time it was also one of the most highly rated when it came to playing games and processing video. It was built on 130nm technology and worked on a voltage of 89w and had a full 1mb of level 2 cache which was a lot at the time (new processors has between 2 and 8mb of on board cache)

I paired it with 2gb of ddr ram and a 256mb ati x800gto graphics card and it allowed me to play all the games at the time (half life 2, FEAR, Call of duty 3) on high settings with nice frame rates. Windows XP really zipped along as well and it coped ok with windows vista when it was released first in beta and then in the release version. It scored a 4.8 on the vista scoring system.
Its been a durable CPU as well as the computer in my house is rarely off during the day so its been used almost every day for almost 4.5 years without a glitch.

I have since updated the memory to 3gb and the graphics card to a nvidia 8800gs in order to keep up with games and it was only recently that I was starting to see it as the bottle neck in the running of the computer. I also wanted to upgrade my memory to to 8gb and run a 64bit OS which my current motherboard wouldn't allow so I decided to upgrade to a newer chip.

In all after 4.5 years of use I can say that the AMD athlon 64 4000 processor was a great value purchase and hopefully it'll keep running for years for the person who buys it on ebay.

Summary: great CPU for the time.

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