X-bit labs

Two Cores at a Low Cost: AMD Athlon 64 X2 3600+ CPU Review

Category: CPU

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

[ 08/11/2006 | 10:34 PM ]

Having lost the leadership in the high-end market segment, AMD started conquering the low-end territory. Today we would like to take a closer look at the new Athlon 64 X2 3600+ that boasts the lowest price point of all the dual-core AMD solutions available in the market.

Table of contents:

• Closer Look
  
• Overclocking
  
• Testbed and Methods
  
• Performance
  
• SYSMark 2004 SE: General Performance
  
• Synthetic Benchmarks
  
• Gaming Applications
  
• Audio and Video Encoding
  
• Image and Video Editing
  
• Archiving Applications
  
• Professional OpenGL and Final Rendering
  
• Conclusion
  

The launch of Intel Core 2 Duo processors provoked significant changes in the processor market. In response to Intel’s launch AMD dropped the prices of its dual-core processors and hence had to completely reposition the entire dual-core processor line-up. The Athlon 64 X2 CPUs that have become considerably less expensive turned into mainstream solutions, which allows AMD to maintain the processor sales on the same level as throughout the past few years.

However, we shouldn’t forget that Core 2 Duo and Athlon 64 X2 are far not the only dual-core processor families existing in the today’s market. Besides them, there are also Intel Pentium D 9XX and Pentium D 8XX CPUs on NetBurst architecture, that haven’t yet been dumped into oblivion. The arrival of Core 2 Duo forced the prices of these processors to go down, so that they rapidly turned into budget dual-core solutions.

In other words, the dual-core Athlon 64 X2 processors acquired new competitors that perform faster and sell at a lower price. In this situation it is pretty hard for AMD to attract new customers. So, it is quite logical that they decided to make the following move. Since they couldn’t really add any new dual-core processor models to the “top” of the processor line-up, because of highly competitive Intel Core based solutions, they decided to expand their product range from the “bottom” by introducing new low-cost solutions that could compete with the Intel Pentium D processors.

Today we would like to introduce to you a new Athlon 64 X2 3600+ processor that was released to serve this particular purpose. This processor is not yet included into the company price-list, however we tend to believe that it should sell at about $130-$140, which is $15-$20 less than the price of Athlon 64 X2 3800+. As a result the newcomer will become direct competitor to Pentium D 915. Although this processor is based on the old Presler core with NetBurst microarchitecture, it boasts very attractive price-to-performance ratio after the last price drop.