AMD Athlon 64 3800+ E3

"With a street price that is lower than that of the P4 560, the 3800+ should be a no brainer for gamers. While there does not seem to be any performance increases from the updated core, the lower voltage should give end users who are planning to overclock some more head room over the previous Newcastle core at the higher end of the AMD line up."

"The Venice core's ace in the hole may be its overclocking potential. If you don't care about dual cores, that probably makes some flavor of Venice-based Athlon 64 the way to go. Our "below average" 3800+ chip hit a rock-solid stable 2.7GHz on air-cooling, and others have reported even better results. Of course, if you want a really monster overclock, you may want to start with the slower, cheaper versions of the Venice core like the 3000+, 3200+, or 3500+. Those chips probably have even more built-in headroom by virtue of their lower default clock speeds, and, hey, they're cheaper."

"The AMD Athlon64 3800+ with Venice core is geared towards performance hungry people, mostly gamers, which have the money. Overclockers will love the Venice. SSE3 makes a small difference, but the difference is so small, that upgrading from Wincehster to Venice is not worth it at the moment. People who are looking into getting a new Socket939 CPU should definitely consider the Venice."

"...the most important advantage of the Athlon 64 processors based on Venice core is the significantly higher frequency potential. This opened new horizons for further AMD processor family development, at the same time giving overclockers got new opportunities for building high-performance systems on the far not the most expensive processors. As for the drawbacks of the new Venice core, there are hardly any. In other words, if you are planning to buy a Socket 939 CPU, then you definitely have to go for the new core. That’s for sure."