Very good for an older chip (AMD Athlon XP 3200+ / 2.2 GHz)

Member Name: LastLine

Product:	AMD Athlon XP 3200+ / 2.2 GHz
Date:	05/06/09 (40 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Still holds it's own five years on

Disadvantages: Starting to show age a little.

Yeah yeah, it's a 2.2 clock speed I know...but ignore that for a moment, as is becoming more and more obvious in today's world clock speed isn't the be all and end all of processing power. It's now possible to get 1.x Ghz chips that run circles around older 3.x ghz chips.

I got this chip as part of a prebuilt Acer system several years ago now, when the system was actually new on the market, as part of a gaming rig, and I have to say that as someone who had previously used Intel processors all my life I was a bit anxious, but AMD had a reputation for being good for gaming with so I figured I'd give it a go.

I was very greatly surprised. The chip actually packs a lot more power than I would have given it credit for, probably due to the new 64 bit architecture of the chip, a technology that even today is not 'standard', long story short 64 bit lets a processor do more than a 32bit counterpart can. This means that handling the streams of information that come in from a processor intensive application such as a 3D game can be handled much more effectively.

It's five years nearly now since I purchased the computer containing this chip, and it's still (just about) enough to run all the new games coming out today, admittedly the advent of dual core processing is starting to make 64 bit a bit outdated but for now it's still performing well.

Summary: Well worth every penny.

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