As we've been covering for a while now, single core processors are still the gaming processors of choice, however the Athlon FX chips today are a tad on the expensive side. Certainly, if money is no object, a gamer can get an AMD Athlon 64 55FX - or a Pentium 4 670 - in order to snag the absolute last erg of gaming performance available by a single core AMD or Intel processor.

But what about the rest of us? Those of us who don't want to spend $1000 on a processor alone?

Well, today we take a look at AMD's Athlon 64 4000+. This processor is based on the San Diego core, and has 128K of L1 cache and 1Mb of L2 cache. It runs at a core speed of 2.4GHz.

Now before some of you go "So what? My P4 670 runs at 3.6GHz!" you should realize that performance cannot be measured by clock speed alone. With its shorter pipelines and different architecture, the Athlon manages to get quite a bit more work done per clock cycle than current P4 designs.

The San Diego core runs at 12 x 200MHz, and runs the memory bus at 200MHz (DDR400 / PC3200); and normally runs the Hypertransport channels at 5x200MHz (1GHz). It is available in 1.3V-1.4V (90nm) or 1.5V (130nm) versions (overclockers take note: for tweaking purposes the lower voltage part should be superior) and is rated at 89W of thermal power and maximum case temperature of 70'C.

We were lucky enough to get our hands on a 1.4V San Diego version of the processor, and we took it out for a spin...