AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+

How we configured our test systems: When configuring the test systems for this review, we first entered their respective system BIOSes and set each board to its "Optimized" or "High-Performance Defaults."  The hard drives were then formatted, and Windows XP Professional (SP2) was installed. When the Windows installation was complete, we installed the drivers necessary for our components, and removed Windows Messenger from the system.  Auto-Updating and System Restore were then disabled, and we set up a 768MB permanent page file on the same partition as the Windows installation. Lastly, we set Windows XP's Visual Effects to "best performance," installed all of our benchmarking software, defragged the hard drives, and ran all of the tests.

Test System Specifications "Intel & AMD Inside!"

Preliminary Benchmarks with SiSoft SANDRA 2005 Synthetic Testing

We began our testing with SiSoftware's SANDRA, the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. SANDRA consists of a set of information and diagnostic utilities that can provide a host of useful information about your hardware and operating system. We ran four of the built-in subsystem tests that partially comprise the SANDRA 2005 suite (CPU, Multimedia, Cache, and Memory) with the Athlon 64 X2 3800+ installed into our test rig.  All of the scores reported below were taken with the processor and memory running at their respective default clock speeds of 2.0GHz and 200MHz (DDR400).

CPU Arithmetic Benchmark A64 X2 3800+ (2.0GHz)

Multimedia Benchmark A64 X2 3800+ (2.0GHz)

CPU Cache Benchmark A64 X2 3800+ (2.0GHz)

Memory Benchmark A64 X2 3800+ (2.0GHz)

The Athlon 64 X2 3800+ performed as we had expected in all of the SANDRA tests that we ran. In the CPU Arithmetic benchmark, the X2 3800+ finished just behind the Athlon 64 X2 4400+ and 4800+, but ahead of the Pentium D 840 and 820. The trend was nearly identical in the Multimedia benchmark, but the Pentium D 840 was able to surpass the X2 3800+ in the floating-point portion of the test. SADNRA's Cache/Memory benchmark had the Athlon 64 X2 3800+ performing almost identically to an Athlon 64 3200+, which is essentially a single-core version of the same CPU, and the Memory bandwidth test reported a peak numbers in the 5.2GB/s range.