Affordable Dual Core from AMD: Athlon 64 X2 3800+
by Anand Lal Shimpi on August 1, 2005 9:36 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
New Pricing, but Higher Cost per Core?
One thing that we noticed in our first review of the Athlon 64 X2 processor was that AMD was surely getting their money's worth out of each X2 sale, especially compared to Intel. Dating back to the launch of the Pentium D, Intel's entry-level Pentium D 820 only came with an $80 premium over its identical single core counterpart. Back then, AMD's cheapest core, the X2 4200+ commanded a $265 premium for its second core.With the introduction of the Manchester core in the Athlon 64 X2 3800+, AMD introduces a much more reasonably priced dual-core CPU, where the cost of the second core has finally dropped to $160. It's still not as low as Intel's lowest, but it is fairly competitive with Intel's closest priced dual core competitor - the 3.0GHz Pentium D 830.
So, what AMD has done is effectively released a price competitor to the Pentium D 830. While it isn't the Pentium D 820 competitor that we were hoping for at a sub-$300 price point, the Athlon 64 X2 3800+ will have to do.
Unfortunately, while AMD announced availability starting today, we have only seen limited availability in the retail channel with only Monarch and Directron listing the chip shipping on 8/12/2005.
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neogodless - Monday, August 1, 2005 - link
new comments system seems to hate Firefoxanyway, all the price links on the article point to the Athlon 64 3800+ rather than the X2...
bersl2 - Monday, August 1, 2005 - link
It WorksForMe(TM).neogodless - Tuesday, August 2, 2005 - link
Good for you... I simply cannot login/post comments while using firefox. It seems to accept the login, as it doesn't spit back an "invalid" message but shows me the login form again, and no links to "post" or "reply". Probably just a cookie issue but I tried turning my security down a little and it still didn't work... is Anandtech requiring a 3rd party cookie to be set just to post comments... ?neogodless - Wednesday, August 3, 2005 - link
Dang it...For a short while a month or so back, I was "approving" each cookie individually, and anandtech insisted on planting a cookie until I said "block site completely" - forgot about that until today. Finally able to post in Firefox now!
Staples - Monday, August 1, 2005 - link
It is an eyesore regardless. I am using FF and I have not tried it in IE.SpaceRanger - Monday, August 1, 2005 - link
Excellent Article. I'm glad that AMD is coming out with more affordable Dual-Core solutions.Marlin1975 - Monday, August 1, 2005 - link
To bad the 2 people listed for having "availability" in this peice are already marking them OVER retail price. Let the price gouging start... :(blkrde - Monday, August 1, 2005 - link
Lets hope the prices come down soon. I need one of these in my new build.neogodless - Wednesday, August 3, 2005 - link
Yeah I haven't upgraded my motherboard/CPU combo in 20 whole months!!Still stuck with a 754 Athlon 64 3000+
I figure the 3800+ is like two of those :)
And like two of those... it'll only increase performance for multi-tasking... but it's already plenty for all the single tasks I have.
Now I paid $215 then... so I guess $430 would be fair for one of these...