Test notes
We've tested the Venice 3800+ against a range of CPUs, including the latest dual-core processors. We've also used a lot of multithreaded applications, which may not seem fair to the single-core Athlon 64 3800+, but life is about to get very unfair indeed for single-core CPUs in the coming months and years as the industry works to use threading more extensively.

There are two comparisons to watch here. The first one is the Venice 3800+ against the older Newcastle-based 3800+. That's a pretty straightforward affair of old versus new, and it will give us a good sense of the clock-for-clock performance benefits of the Venice core. The second is the Venice 3800+ against the Pentium 4 660, Intel's single-core competition. Truth be told, the 3800+'s most direct competitor is probably the Pentium 4 650 at 3.4GHz, which lists for about $25 more than the 3800+. However, the 3800+ may well hold its own against the slightly faster and more expensive P4 660.

Also, we have included results for the Pentium D 840 in our testing, which we obtained by disabling Hyper-Threading on our Extreme Edition 840. Since the Pentium D 840 is just an Extreme Edition 840 sans HT, the numbers should be valid.

Our testing methods
As ever, we did our best to deliver clean benchmark numbers. Tests were run at least twice, and the results were averaged.

Our test systems were configured like so:

Note that we have more total memory on the Opteron rig. I don't believe any of our benchmarks are constrained by available RAM in a 1GB system, but you'll still want to keep the difference in mind.

All tests on the Pentium systems were run with Hyper-Threading enabled, except where otherwise noted.

Thanks to Corsair and OCZ for providing us with memory for our testing. This matchup required lots of high-quality RAM, so we had to spread the love around. Both brands are far and away superior to generic, no-name memory.

Also, all of our test systems were powered by OCZ PowerStream power supply units. The PowerStream was one of our Editor's Choice winners in our latest PSU round-up.

The test systems' Windows desktops were set at 1152x864 in 32-bit color at an 85Hz screen refresh rate. Vertical refresh sync (vsync) was disabled for all tests.

We used the following versions of our test applications:

• SiSoft Sandra 2005 SR1 10.50 64-bit
• ScienceMark 2.0 64-bit
• Compiled binary of C Linpack port from Ace's Hardware
• POV-Ray for Windows 3.6 64-bit
• SMPOV 4.3
• 3ds max 7.0
• Cinebench 2003
• LAME MT 3.97a 64-bit
• Xmpeg 5.0.3 with DivX Video 5.21
• Windows Media Encoder 9
• Sphinx 3.3
• picCOLOR v4.0 build 545 64-bit
• DOOM 3 1.1 with trdelta1 demo
• Far Cry 1.3 with tr3-pier demo
• Unreal Tournament 2004 v3355 with trdemo1
• 3DMark05 v120

The tests and methods we employ are generally publicly available and reproducible. If you have questions about our methods, hit our forums to talk with us about them.