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Conclusions

From a performance stand point, the changes between the Venice and the Winchester are not earth shattering. There are definite changes to the memory controller as seen in the SiSoft Sandra and Rightmark Memory Analyzer benchmarks; latency favors the Venice while raw bandwidth favors the Winchester. AMD seems to have it balanced so that there are nearly no differences between the two cores in benchmarking. SSE3 does not seem to have played a role in any of the benchmarks today either. One of the advantages that are not seen in the benchmarks is the reduced voltage which means reduced heat and in turn, reduced noise. This may be significant for those looking at AMD's higher end processors but are wary about noise. The voltage reduction will also mean that AMD will have the option to give their processors a bump in speed.

As is seen in the benchmarks, the Athlon 64 3800+ is very fast and is fairly dominant in gaming, but it does have some weaknesses on the rendering and encoding side of things. There should be no instances where a 3.0 Ghz P4 should beat the 3800+, but we see that in both XviD encoding as well as MPEG2 encoding. For those who like to dabble in media editing / encoding, the results here suggest that an Intel solution would be a better choice.

On the gaming front, the Athlon 64 3800+ is generally ahead in nearly every game in the benchmark suite - depending on the video card and image quality settings used the differences seen here will shrink to some degree but there is no doubt that when the processor is the limitation, it is AMD that will provide the better frame rates. Assuming frame rates scale at the same rate with higher clockspeeds, the Intel P4 570 will still be unable to catch the Athlon 64 3800+. Overclockers should be pretty thrilled with the potential of the Venice, it did not take too much coaxing to get in the 2.9 Ghz range. Those with exotic cooling solutions should be able to crack the 3.0 Ghz barrier fairly easily if our sample is any indication.

With a street price that is lower than that of the P4 560, the 3800+ should be a no brainer for gamers. While there does not seem to be any performance increases from the updated core, the lower voltage should give end users who are planning to overclock some more head room over the previous Newcastle core at the higher end of the AMD line up.

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