Conclusions
Thanks to its on-chip memory controller and its ability to use unbuffered DIMMs, the 3400+ has the lowest memory access latencies we've ever seen. The benchmarks put the Athlon 64 3400+ just behind the Athlon 64 FX-51 in terms of overall performance, and I suppose AMD's "3400+" model number is warranted, at least for gamers, for whatever that's worth. As has often been the case, which chip is fastest depends quite a bit on what you want to do. The Athlon 64 3400+ pummels the Pentium 4 3.2GHz in most of our gaming benchmarks, although the P4 stills does relatively well in our media encoding, speech recognition, and SSE2-laden 3D rendering tests. Athlon 64 processors are strong across the board, though, with few real performance weaknesses.

The most interesting questions about the A64 3400+, however, aren't strictly about its performance. Many enthusiasts will have a hard time forking over the cash to build a system based on AMD's 754-pin socket. Socket 754 only allows for a single-channel memory configuration, and AMD has already made clear its intention to move all Athlon 64 products to a new 939-pin socket later this year. If you're hoping to to upgrade your processor to a higher speed grade down the road, Socket 754 isn't a very good bet. Then again, as fast as things move in motherboards, chipsets, and memory these days, many of us have just resigned ourselves to performing a motherboard upgrade along with each processor upgrade.

AMD has priced the 3400+ at $417, exactly at price parity, at least for now, with the Pentium 4 3.2GHz. The Athlon 64 FX-51 will remain at $733, making it an almost irrational purchase decision. The 3400+ is nearly as fast as the FX-51 in most applications, if not faster. The FX-51's need for regisitered memory makes for two strikes against it: higher costs and higher latencies. Strike three, perhaps, is the need to purchase DIMMs in pairs because of the dual-channel config. Overall, the 3400+ is much more economical than the FX-51.

In fact, the 3400+ is the product that should finally push the Athlon 64 into the mainstream market. With its introduction, the Athlon 64 3200+ drops to $278, and the 3000+ slots in at a very affordable $218. Those prices mirror Intel's prices for the Pentium 4 3.0GHz and 2.8GHz chips exactly. With these price cuts, the Athlon 64 has arrived in earnest. Now, if only we had a 64-bit version of Windows to run on it...