AMD Athlon 64 3800+ - Page 10

- Conclusion

AMD Athlon 64 3800+

AMD's Athlon 3800+ is undoubtedly one of the best processors you can acquire for your computer. With its only drawback being its price (around $660), even if it's cheaper than the FX-53, it's still a large amount of money that right now, only enthusiasts are likely to fork out for a new processor.

For those of you who are not looking for an upgrade to a high-end system but something less pricey, obviously the 3800+ isn't the right choice yet. You can just as well choose an Athlon 64 3500+ or an Intel 3.0Ghz, depending on what you use your computer for. However, keep in mind that with the socket infrastructure change from AMD, chances are that you'll have to upgrade your motherboard as well when time comes and your processor drops to the low-end class and needs to be upgraded again.

Microsoft Windows XP x64 Edition

It was a relief to see that our experience with the beta version wasn't as painful as we thought it would be. We played around with x64 for about a week and everything worked out satisfactory.

Of course, it's not an operating system you can still count on for your work and there's no reason really for you to install it just yet. However, the work that has been done by Microsoft to port the 32-bit code into 64-bits is excellent. Keep in mind that all applications now have the ability to do calculations twice as long, but instead of having a major drop in performance, AMD's x86-64 architecture worked fine, along with the new OS, optimizing everything so that such a drop never actually takes place.

Also congratulations should also go to ATI for delivering a quite stable 64-bit driver even though time has shown us that this is the area where it's mostly handicapped.

We really look forward to seeing the final version of WinXP x64 bit being released. Hopefully, by that time, we'll see many more applications ported and optimized for 64-bit computing.