Verdict: The Athlon 64 3800+ is well past its prime.

From 2003 to mid-2006, if you wanted to buy a new CPU, the chances are that your best option would be some form of Athlon 64. However, when Intel introduced the Core architecture in mid-2006, the K8 architecture, on which the Athlon 64 is based, started to age very badly.

The Athlon 64 3800+ is the last of what was a huge range of single-core Athlon 64s. It's clocked at 2.4GHz and has 512KB of Level 2 cache - specifications that would have elicited sighs of envy from other CPUs two years ago; today, however, such specs are decidedly weedy. The integrated memory controller supports up to PC2-6400 DDR2 RAM, while the CPU supports 64-bit instructions, SSE3, Enhanced Virus Protection and Cool n Quiet. The latter feature means that the CPU will slow down to 1GHz when no foreground tasks are running, thereby cutting power consumption and heat output.

When the Athlon 64 3800+ was first launched, most games weren't sufficiently multithreaded to take advantage of multicore and SMP systems. However, more games are now taking advantage of the prevalence of multicore CPUs. In Supreme Commander, for example, the dual-core Athlon 64 X2 4600+, which also runs at 2.4GHz and has 512KB of Level 2 cache per core, was twice as fast as the Athlon 64 3800+. Other types of applications, such as video encoding, graphics applications and Folding@home, also run much faster on multicore CPUs.

We've passed the point where multicore CPUs provide little benefit, and this can be seen in the single-core Athlon 64's test results. Almost every benchmark we ran on the Athlon 64 3800+ took significantly longer to complete than on the dual and quad-core processors. Given that a dual-core processor will only set you back an extra £7, you'd be mad to buy a single-core Athlon 64 now.

• PSUs - 14th July 2008
• Multi-GPU graphics - 20th June 2008
• CPU water cooling - 17th June 2008
• Hard disks - 20th March 2008
• Audio hardware - 29th February 2008
• Graphics cards - 24th January 2008
• CPUs - 21st December 2007

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