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Review: AMD Athlon™ 64 3400+
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This 3400+
has friends
Here are the supporting partners who
provided their products to make this review possible.
The motherboard
 When
AMD sent us the 3400+ for review, we immediately went out
to find a good socket 754 motherboard to use in our review.
Abit
answered the call by offering to send us their KV8-MAX3. The
KV8 use VIA’s newest K8T800/VT8237 chipset North and
South Bridge.
This has to be the baddest looking
motherboard I’ve ever seen. It has OTES cooling system
for the power regulators and capacitors. First time I have
ever seen cooling for anything on a motherboard besides the
Northbridge. This board is loaded with Gigabit LAN, 1394 Firewire,
USB 2.0, RAID SATA 150, onboard sound and of course, Abit’s
excellent Soft Menu functions. I’ve been a long time
fan of Abit’s motherboards so I was very excited to be
getting back and running with an Abit product.
Moving on to cables, this board has
every cable under the sun including four (4) SATA cables.
The truth is that I’m frankly shocked at the extra’s
in the box. I’m not sure how it somehow became the motherboard
vendor’s job to make sure the box is packed with extras
— but WOW it is great. The motherboard has been stable
as a rock and with Abit’s overclocking prowess, I can’t
wait to get under the hood and “play”. Be sure to
look at the features here.
They are impressive.
We need
storage!
 Seagate
has been making excellent hard drives for a very long time
now. I have been using various Barracuda drives for quite
a time and so when I needed to add some SATA HDD for this
review, I did not hesitate to request a couple of the newest
160GB
7200 RPM Barracuda drives.
They have always proven to be fast,
quiet and reliable. I had a Western
Digital drive die on me a couple of months ago and it
reminded me that I have not had that many drives go bad on
me in the 10+ years I have been using computers. That dead
drive was the 3rd Western Digital drive that failed on me.
I then realized that I have quite a few Seagate drives and
not a single one has ever failed.
Memory is a requirement too
We have often worked with Corsair
in a roundabout sort of way. Never asking them directly for
samples but since AMD is so fond of Corsair, we decided to
give them a ring. They were happy to send us samples for our
AMD 3400+ review. They sent us their newest XMS
PC3200 sticks that actually had LED on top to monitor
the memory access.
 The
XMS PC3200 performed great and is very, very quick. Of course
they operate at CAS 2 and with this motherboard, overclocking
should be a breeze. I’m counting on this Corsair memory
being stable as the FSB climbs.
It’s all about the pictures
We have been working on getting samples
of the Radeon 9800XT and NVIDIA based 5950 boards especially
to benchmark with LOMAC. We have had some success, so we decided
to throw in a Radeon 9800XT and see how it performed with
our 3400+.
Sapphire
was the board I decided to use in my review. They have a very
balanced feature set along with a nicely designed 9800XT.
The board was stable and blazing fast. It comes with a nice
bundle including a free coupon for HalfLife2.
 The
Sapphire
Radeon 9800XT Atlantis comes with 256MB of DDR RAM and
uses a 256-bit interface like the 9700 PRO. The core is clocked
at 412MHz and the memory is clocked at 730MHz (365MHz DDR).
The board is DX9 compliant. Did I mention it was fast?
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