Conclusion

Well I can say with a clean conscience that the 3200+ definitely lived up to my expectations. What I felt the CPU needed to accomplish were 3 goals.

One was to run at same temps or lower than existing CPUs at same frequencies. I also thought that this CPU should overclock the same or better than contemporaries to be considered a success. Finally, it should be as fast as its peers and no slower (e.g. Prescott vs. Northwood core P4).

The 3200+ that I reviewed came through with shining colors. Not only did it meet the 3 goals I mentioned, but also it improved upon performance of its older 3500+ 0.13µ 512k sibling at equal clock speeds. Falling somewhere in between performance numbers of the 3500+ and the Athlon FX-53, the 3200+ nestled itself a nice little niche to show me that it does indeed have some sort of core enhancements that have improved performance over previous Newcastle 0.13µ cores. While still not quite up to the task of taking out the Athlon FX-53, I think that a $200 CPU going along for the benchmark ride and coming out within the shadow of FX-53 performance is admirable. Certainly one could argue that when it comes to bang for the buck, the 3200+ A64 0.09µ CPU is unbeatable in this roundup.

When Intel released the Pentium 4 "C" series processors with 800 MHz FSB the enthusiast’s crowd gasped in amazement. Not so much at the prices of the higher end P4 "C" CPUs; that was more of a gasp of exasperation! However, the Pentium4 2.4 "C" provided most of what overclockers as a crowd wanted, a stable platform on which to work (865/875 chipsets), affordable prices, and a highly overclockable CPU with which to work. Stories were rampant over the internet on how a 2.4C@3ghz was about as low as you could expect, and I myself enjoyed a 2.4C@3.6ghz for many months. While fan boys crowed on both sides of the fence about how AMD or Intel was better, there is no disputing that the 2.4 "C" was a wildly popular CPU in its own right, and was able to give people top shelf performance with low to mid-level pricing.

This is where I find myself gravitating today as I type this out. When I got this CPU and began to put it through its paces, I couldn’t help but get a feeling that we were on the cusp of something great. Newer, better, faster, smaller, and cooler CPUs will come and go throughout time. However relatively few bring such an immense satisfaction in operation, function and overclockability, at least to this reviewer.

I am lucky enough to own an AMD Athlon FX-53 CPU, Athlon64 socket 754 3400+ clawhammer (1mb L2 cache) and this 3200+ 0.09µ socket 939 chip, as well as numerous P4 and Athlon XP CPUs. I can without a doubt say that this is my favorite CPU for reasons I have mentioned such as bang for the buck, overclockability, performance, and stability.

Say what you want, but there is something just vastly satisfying about overclocking a “little” CPU to a level of performance higher than the fastest available retail CPUs. I suppose an argument can be made that a higher end CPU is still overclockable and should have enough headroom to again best its little overachieving brother. Then again, who among us has $850 to spend just on a CPU? Would that other $600-625 be better off spent on a new video card, better ram, or beefy power supply?

I have absolutely no hesitation in recommending this CPU to anyone considering an upgrade at this time. I feel that the stars have aligned, so to speak, to make this my recommended CPU for most persons upgrading their computers. Finally, we have motherboards that can scale to high HTT speeds giving the newer more overclockable Athlon64 Socket 939 chips long legs on which to run. New performance memory from companies such as OCZ, Corsair, Kingston, Mushkin, and G.SKILL (a relatively newcomer to the performance scene) are providing ram modules that allow us to not only maintain livable latency but scale to impressive MHz levels.

In what will probably raise some eyebrows I contend that the Athlon64 3200+ 0.09µ socket 939 is “the next 2.4 C”.

Thank you for reading, comments and questions can be dropped of at our forums

/JNav89GT signing off