It’s been quite a while since we looked at an AMD processor on Driverheaven and in that time AMD have been busy enhancing their range of CPU’s. The socket 939 Athlon64’s have begun moving to the Venice core and AMD have also launched the X2 brand of Dual Core Athlon64’s so let’s kill two birds with one stone and have a look at a processor of each type. The 3800+ and the 4800+, and see how they compare to one of Intel’s latest and greatest, the 3.46 GHz P4EE.

The New Athlons

3800+ Venice Core

The Athlon64 3800+ looks much like any other Athlon64 on the exterior, it uses the standard 939pin design and metal heat spreader that you will have seen before however the design of the Venice core differs in a few major ways.

Firstly AMD have now added full support for SSE3 which is a step ahead of Intel’s current CPU’s which added SSE3 support as an addition to SSE2. At this time there are not many applications which use SSE3 however it’s good to have as future proof a feature set as possible.

Next up on the changes is a new memory controller, the Venice core has resolved a long standing bug in the Athlon64 memory controller which affected some users who wanted to run dual sided DDR400 at 1T. Affected users would find their system to be unstable with these settings or drop to DDR333 speeds however this is no longer an issue. There are also a few tweaks to the controller which should enhance performance over the older controller versions.

Finally on the major changes we have a move to lower running core voltages, the sample CPU we are using today operates on 1.4v which allows for less heat to be generated and less power is required into the system.

The above changes mean that the CPU transistor count has moved from approx 105Million to 114 Million Transistors.

X2 4800+

For those of you who haven’t been reading up on AMD’s recent launches the basic concept of the X2 is that it is 2 of AMD's Athlon64 FX cores on the same processor die. These two cores share the CPU memory controller and hypertransport connections.

The 4800+ is a 90nm Design and uses the socket 939 connector that many of you Athlon64 users will already be using. This means that the CPU works in most (if not all) of the existing 939 motherboards on the market, all that is required is a bios update. We tested this CPU on an up to date A8N-SLI Deluxe with a recent bios and it worked fine, we also updated the older A8V Deluxe to the most recent bios and again the CPU worked so it’s looking great in that regard, an excellent design decision from AMD.

You would think that with two Athlon64 FX cores running on the same CPU die the thermal properties would mean a huge cooler would be required - however this is not the case and any cooler which works on an FX55 will handle the X2 with ease.

Next: Test System