Athlon 64 3800+ E3 Core Revision

We managed to get hold of one Venice based Athlon 64 processor – 3800+. This is the top model from the family of new Athlon 64 CPUs, which will start shipping before April 15.

The new Venice based CPU looks just like its predecessors:

You can tell the newcomer from the marking. The last two letters “BP” indicate that there is a new Venice core (E3 revision) under the processor package lid.

CPU-Z diagnostic utility provides us the following information about this processor.

As we see, the latest version of the CPU-Z available at the time the testing was done, version 1.28, has no idea who Venice is. But it detects SSE3 support and reveals the CPUID of the new processors: 00020FF0h.

Before we pass over to the actual testing of the new processor on Venice core, we decided to check the compatibility of this processor with different Socket 939 mainboards. The thing is that there have been quite a few rumors about the compatibility issues Venice based Athlon 64 processors might have. Luckily, and our test session proved it, these rumors were too exaggerated. We checked a few mainboards on NVIDIA nForce3 chipset: MSI Neo2 Platinum and EPoX 9NDA3J, and a few boards on NVIDIA nForce4 chipset: ASUS A8N-SLI, EPoX 9NPA+ Ultra, DFI NF4 Ultra-D and MSI Neo4 Platinum SLI. There wasn’t a single case when the new Venice based processor wouldn’t work any of these mainboards at all. However, we still revealed a few issues (even though we reflashed the latest BIOS versions to all the boards in advance). On most mainboards Cool’n’Quiet technology of the new Athlon 64 3800+ didn’t work. In fact, the only mainboard where this power saving technology showed some signs of life was MSI Neo4 Platinum SLI. With the help of this board we found out that during low power consumption Athlon 64 3800+ on Venice core drops its clock frequency to 1.0GHz and Vcore to 1.1V, i.e. behaves just like any of its predecessors.

Moreover, we have also discovered some other minor problems. For example, ASUS A8N-SLI mainboard set the processor Vcore incorrectly, making it 0.1V higher, and DFI NF4 Ultra-D refused to work with the 1T memory timing when we installed the new Venice processor. Actually, you can see that all these issues are very specific for each mainboard and they will undoubtedly be eliminated when the new BIOS versions come out.