AMD Venice - Conclusion
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In this review we took a look at the AMD Athlon 64 with the new Venice core. AMD has tweaked the core a bit and added some extras, like SSE3, and gave it a new name. To see what AMD has been up to I brought out its brother, the Winchester. Just as how the boxes are exactly the same, the two different cores performed the same clock for clock. The improved memory controller appears to be worse then before. Still can’t run 4 sticks of memory at DDR400, and the total bandwidth has decreased. The Venice core adds SSE3 support which has been an Intel only up until this point. There isn’t even much software that is capable of taking advantage of SEE3 yet. Once some software that is optimized for it comes out, hopefully we will see a difference. Until then don’t expect to get anything more of the Venice clock for clock.
So who should run out and buy a Venice? I would recommend it to a few types of people. Extreme overclockers, who will go and buy a few of them until they find a good one, should pick up Venice. If you don’t have an A64 and are planning on upgrading, then I would buy this over the older Winchesters as they cost about the same.
Most people probably have an A64 which overclocks to their needs already. As this review has shown, clock for clock these two chips are basically the same. You should only buy if for the little more head room, and gambling on a good overclock is just that, a gamble. Yes, the Venice cores are frequently breaking 2.7 GHz, but if you’re at lets say 2.5GHz, which is a moderate overclock, is the extra 200 MHz worth it? It’s up to you.
Thank you for reading the DevHardware review of the AMD A64 Venice. If you have any questions feel free to drop by the forums.
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