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AMD Athlon 64 3000+ Socket 939 with Venice Core

Friday, August 5th, 2005 | CPU Processor Reviews, Reviews

The AMD Athlon 64 series are very powerful and very good quality chips. They provide some of the strongest performance that can be found today. This one is my pick for the fastest processor I would get, at time of writing.

Both AMD and Intel have moved into the realm of dual core processors, which mates two cores into a single chip. Although that is good for the development of chips and improvement in speeds, they are still too expensive for my liking.

So, why would this be my processor of choice.

Firstly, it’s the bottom of the pile of Athlon 64. It is the slowest in the current range from AMD. This always works in my favor because the prices are very good, with this one coming in at around $150 with a standard fan.

It’s speed is good, but doesn’t quite match up to the latest out there.

However, this chip runs at extremely low temperatures. While the whole range were getting hotter and hotter, meaning that the chips were running at higher and higher temperatures, this one set a new standard of energy efficient, cool running chips.

That coolness, allows one great feature, overclocking.

As the slowest and the fastest of the same core are nearly the same, it’s often possible to push the chip further than it is set at the factory, and the same applies for this chip.

It’s standard bus speed is 200MHz, which can safely be pushed to as far as 266MHz (33% increase) while still using the standard fan, and only increasing the voltages slightly. You also need a motherboard and memory that handle these increased bus speeds. Dual channel DDR memory that can go up to 533MHz is necessary, you can find some by searching this site. The motherboard I recommend is an MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum Socket 939 Motherboard or the MSI K8N Platinum with SLI support, which have tons of extras and can handle these increased loads.

HTT needs to be reduced to 4x, chipset voltage raised to 1.7v, DIMM voltage raised to 2.8v and Vcore raised to 1.55v. The standard fan is fine.

With these settings you will get performance that nearly outdoes the AMD Athlon 64 3800+ plus you get the advantages of higher bus speeds. These speeds were accomplished with a AMD Athlon 64 3000+ with Winchester core, the Venice core model is actually capable of more overclocking, as can be seen in this article at hexus.

So, you should be able to easily gain great performance from a processor that has good value, just the reason that people overclock.

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