Closer Look at AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+

We have already discussed the peculiarities of dual-core AMD processors in our article called AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+ Dual-Core Processor Review . The new Athlon 64 X2 3800+ differs from its faster counterparts by smaller L2 cache, which is 512KB for each of the processor cores (Athlon 64 X2 4600+ and Athlon 64 X2 4200+ feature the L2 cache of the same size), and by lower clock frequency, which is 2.0GHz. This way the entire AMD Athlon 64 X2 processor family now looks as follows:

The full specifications list for the new AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ is given in the table below:

I would like to draw your attention to the fact that the Thermal Design Power for AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ is set to 89W. It means that the CPU is compatible with all those mainboards and cooling systems that suit for regular Athlon 64 processors. The remarkable thing here is that all the previous Athlon 64 X2 processor models except 4200+ featured typical heat dissipation of 110W.

Another interesting thing is that Athlon 64 3800+ has set processor Vcore of 1.35V. Of course, it means that they didn’t have to increase the Vcore to 1.4V for their youngest CPU model production.

The diagnostic CPU-Z utility reports the following about Athlon 64 X2 3800+:

No surprises here, as you may see. The utility recognizes the Manchester core working at 2GHz frequency.