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LOSTCIRCUITS	SHORTCUTS: The Missing Pin The Numbers Game / Test Configurations Latencies Memory Bandwidty Sysmark2004 Sysmark Continued 3ds max, Amorphium3 Cinebench3 Gaming Benchmarks More Gaming Benchmarks Overclocking, Conclusions Give Us Some Feedback to Help Us Improve our Reviews
AMD Athlon64 FX53 Back to the top
(Review by MS, July 1, 2004)

Overclocking

There had to be a bitter pill somewhere, no matter what we tried, there was no way of squeezing more than some extra 100 MHz out of the 3800+. That is, where we could clock the FX53 up to a whopping 2700 MHz, the 3800 started choking around 2500 MHz, regardless of the memory we used or the BIOS settings. This observation does not appear to be a factor of the respective mainboard either, since our findings only confirm what others have observed before. In other words, there appears to be relatively little headroom in the current version of the 3800+ but die refinements will probably add a bit more overhead.

Conclusion

There is not much in terms of conclusions that needs to be spelled out here, the AMD Athlon64 3800+ has swept most of the gaming benchmarks and is no slouch when it comes to other applications either. In most cases, the 3800+ was on par with the FX53 processor, however, the smaller cache shows in some of the applications. The question is once again whether it really matters or not.

From a manufacturing standpoint, the 3800+ is a clear win for AMD in that the smaller Newcastle die is much less costly to make than the larger Sledgehammer. From a performance standpoint, the situation is similar, the 3800+ is the fastest or amongst the fastest AMD processors out there and the result is a relatively inexpensive processor with a substantial profit margin and where the lower speedgrades can still be funneled into the channel as Athlon64 3500+. What else could they want?

What else could we want? Quite honestly, seeing the reduced cache on the 3800+ was some bit of a let-down, at least if you want to have it all, that is, the capability of running low latency memory and the full size L2 cache. The solution is simple, though, in that the FX53 comes in a Socket 939 version as well, which can run on unbuffered memory. It's a bit more expensive, though.

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