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The Verdict

Obviously the Athlon 64 4000+ is a little powerhouse. It's not for everyone though, the biggest problem right now is its pricing, which is in the 500-600 EUR/ USD range. That's a lot of money people. If you want the best though well, then nothing much can match this, except the even more expensive FX-55 CPU of course. Now I already stated this in the beginning, we are a hardware site with a strong focus on gamers. So if you ask me what a gamer should buy, at this time and moment it still is an AMD CPU. There's not one consumer Pentium 4 CPU out there that can match the game performance of this AMD CPU. If you are not so much a gamer and more a desktop/office user, you might miss HyperThreading. So as you can see it's not exact math here, both giants have slight advantages and disadvantages. But for a gamer the AMD CPU's still offer more bang for your bucks.

Going back to gaming, the high-end graphics cards these days need even higher performing processors. Even with the Athlon 64 4000+ we often stumble into the fact that the geometric data that the CPU presents to the graphics card driver to be rendered in that actual graphics card is with certain games too slow. CPU performance limitations are going to be a real issue for upcoming generations of high-end graphics cards. I for sure can't wait to see dual-core processors, but for now the Athlon 64 4000+ will be more than sufficient.

AMD right now has my personal preference though. See Intel needs much higher clockspeeds to accomplish what AMD can do at only 2400 MHz. A positive side effect here is that the AMD CPUs run at a lower wattage, voltage and thus is cheaper in regards to power-consumption but most of all, also heat.

Another good thing about this CPU has to be that it's going to last for a while, you have a 64-bit ready processor in the heart of that PC of yours that is ready for Microsoft's 64-bit operating system. It's clear that the Athlon 64 4000+ for both applications and gaming is a swift powerhouse.

Last words of wisdom, if you can afford it, highly recommended as it'll make your PC hover a little ! AMD has done an excellent job with the Athlon64 4000+.

We'd like to thank AMD for providing this processor.