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Using stock air cooling (Thermalright SLK800), we hit the brick wall at roughly 2500 MHz, which is not bad after all. We did not increase the voltage beyond 1.7V, though. Thermal dissipation certainly plays an important role since the stock cooler (Ajigo MF035-032) included with the review kit did not allow stable operation beyond 2270 Mhz. Getting another 200 MHz out of just switching from one (air) cooler to another (running at much lower noise levels) really underscores the quality and efficacy of the Thermalright products.

Conclusion

In retrospect it is somewhat surprising how close we came with our predictions based on the overclocked "XP3152+" to the real performance of the XP3200+ (despite all the flaming we had to endure). But then, it is not really that surprising after all. It was clear that the XP3200+ would mostly be a bump in system bus frequency and while we have no doubt that the majority of XP3200+ will run at 2300 MHz real clock speed, it would bring the processors rather close to their margins, especially under conditions where cooling and power are not entirely adequate.

Adequate in this case circumscribes the (lack of) dust bunnies, (lack of) summer heat or other averse climatic conditions, clean power and a variety of other issues. In so far, the decision of sticking with a real clock speed of 2200 MHz is more than justified, especially since the performance definitely warrants another product designation.

Surprising about the new platform is the impact of disabling APIC mode and the concurrent performance boost in Content Creation applications. One caveat in this respect is whether the increase in scores is for real or an artifact in the benchmark, especially since only ContentCreation Winstones appeared to be affected. On the other hand, it does appear as if there is still some margin left for improvement on the mainboard / BIOS level. Those improvements may be minor, though.

In summary, it appears as if AMD is on the right track. Enabling the 400 MHz data rate interface increases the bandwidth of the processor bus to 3.2 GB/sec and, moreover, allows to run DDR400 in synchronous mode. This cuts down on the latencies while providing the necessary bandwidth. We need to keep in mind, though, that DDR400 is not the end of it, most likely, we will see DDR 466 followed by DDR533 by the end of this year and that would require yet another speed bump in the bus interface in order to take advantage of it. Aside from yield issues, there are no real technical obstacles on that roadmap.

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