AMD Athlon XP 3200+

In August this year, we had reviewed the P 4 3.2 GHz, the last of the P4 series other than the P4 extreme edition with 2 MB L2 cache. This time we have the last of the Athlon XP series, the AMD Athlon XP 3200+. It has a 400 MHz front side bus and runs at 2.2 GHz.

We tested the processor with an Asus A7N8X motherboard with 512 MB DDR SDRAM and GeForce4 Ti 4600 graphics card. We compared the processor with the Athlon XP 3000+, tested on the same configuration, and Intel P4 3.2 and 3.0 GHz, tested on an Intel 875PBZ motherboard with the rest of configuration being same.

In the benchmarks, the 3200+ performed better than others in Business Winstone, Content Creation Winstone and MP 3 encoding. But in graphics benchmarks and DivX encoding, the performance of 3200+ was no match for the Pentium 4 3.2. It was even lower than the 3.0 GHz on these yardsticks.

S N   A   P   S   H O   T Price : $464 (three-year warranty on boxed processor)  Key specs : 400 MHz FSB Contact : AMD, Bangalore.  Tel : 51123540/41 E-mail : amd@surfgold.com

Overall, the processor impressed us with excellent and unprecedented BW and CCW results. But low scores in graphics benchmarks is a shortcoming of the processor.

Anoop Mangla