The Fours Have It: Athlon64 3400+ For 2004
The Athlon64 continues to gain in popularity since its September 2003 launch. One reason for this is that the processors are generally readily available; another, however, is that more and more manufacturers now make motherboards for the processor with Socket 754.
But that alone is not enough to justify the around $400 / €425 asking price for an Athlon64 3200+ - not exactly pocket change. AMD is aware of that fact and responded a few weeks ago with the Athlon64 3000+. It's a 3200+ with a pared down 512 kB L2 cache and the same 2.0 GHz clock speed. At $225 / €250, the price is the only thing they skimped on.
With the introduction of the 3400+, the product portfolio is now being rounded off at the upper end. From a technical standpoint, everything is as you'd expect: 1 MB L2 cache, DDR400 memory controller and a HyperTransport channel for communicating with the chipset. The processor speed is the only thing that's different, rising from 2.0 to 2.2 GHz to put it on a par with the clock rate of the Athlon64 FX-51.
