Tom's Hardware > All Reviews > Components > CPU > Revving up in the New Year: AMD Athlon64 3400+ versus Intel P4 3.2 GHz

Revving up in the New Year: AMD Athlon64 3400+ versus Intel P4 3.2 GHz

06:00 - Tuesday 6 January 2004 by Patrick Schmid

1. The Fours Have It: Athlon64 3400+ For 2004
2. Athlon64 3400+ In Detail
3. Cool & Quiet: Glad To See It, Too Bad It's Largely Ignored
4. Overclocking: Looks Good!
5. Test Setup
6. Benchmark Results
7. SPECviewperf 7.1
8. SPECviewperf 7.1, Continued
9. OpenGL Games: Serious Sam
10. OpenGL Games: Wolfenstein Enemy Territory
11. Synthetic: 3D Mark 2001 SE
12. Games: Comanche 4
13. Games: Unreal Tournament 2003
14. Games: Splinter Cell
15. Games: Warcraft III - The Frozen Thorne
16. Synthetic: 3D Mark 2003
17. Game: X2 - The Threat Rolling
18. Game: Gun Metal

19. Games: AquaMark3
20. MPEG-Encoding: Main Concept MPEG-Encoder
21. MPEG-Encoding: Pinnacle Studio 8.8
22. MPEG-Encoding: Xmpeg & Divx 5.1 Pro
23. MPEG-Encoding: Windows Media Encoder 9
24. MPEG-Encoding: MS Movie Maker 2
25. Magix MP3 Maker 2004 Diamond
26. Lame MP3 Encoder
27. Steinberg Nuendo 2
28. Sysmark 2002
29. Winrar 3.2
30. Newtek Lightwave 7.5
31. Cinema 4D XL 8.1
32. 3D Studio Max 5.1
33. Mathematica 5
34. PC Mark 2002 Pro
35. SiSoft Sandra Max 3
36. Conclusion: More Speed Is Good

The Athlon64 continues to gain in popularity since its September 2003 launch. One reason for this is that the processors are generally readily available; another, however, is that more and more manufacturers now make motherboards for the processor with Socket 754.

But that alone is not enough to justify the around $400 / €425 asking price for an Athlon64 3200+ - not exactly pocket change. AMD is aware of that fact and responded a few weeks ago with the Athlon64 3000+. It's a 3200+ with a pared down 512 kB L2 cache and the same 2.0 GHz clock speed. At $225 / €250, the price is the only thing they skimped on.

With the introduction of the 3400+, the product portfolio is now being rounded off at the upper end. From a technical standpoint, everything is as you'd expect: 1 MB L2 cache, DDR400 memory controller and a HyperTransport channel for communicating with the chipset. The processor speed is the only thing that's different, rising from 2.0 to 2.2 GHz to put it on a par with the clock rate of the Athlon64 FX-51.