Rated 
First AMD purchase, satisfied
Price/performance, warranty
Power consumption, cache size
Posted Sep 7, 2006 - There isn't much to comment on with respect to a processor. There are plenty of reviews and benchmarks that describe its performance aspect, which show that it is comparable to or slightly better than an Intel Pentium D 930. It is positioned as the entry level dual-core AMD offering, a position that Intel Pentium D 805 occupied just a few months ago. For its price, the AMD AM2 X2 3800 is a good deal. There are just enough AM2 motherboards around to make a low-cost but up-to-date system possible. With the advent of Intel's Core 2 Duo, AMD processors no longer monopolize the claim to be cool-running. Whilst there are low power versions of this processor available at a slight premium, the standard version is still quite a lightbulb (38C idle, 50C under load), but never so much so as to be a problem. Cool'n'Quiet works, but somehow just isn't all that impressive. For example, I don't believe there is core shutdown or anything beyond what the last generation of mobile processors have implemented (although to be fair, this is a desktop processor design). Hardware virtualization support is there, but it doesn't even get used. VMWare seems to have implemented Intel's virtualization technology, for now. Bottom line: For the price-sensitive, this seems to be a good value at the moment.
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Comment about this review
good bang for buck, but look out for core 2 duo
