i just bought a SR1630NX compaq presario. with AMD 3500+ venice core 512kb/L2, 512MB PC3200, 200gig IDE... blah blah... google for the rest... to replace my old: AMD XP 2000+ w/1GIG PC133 my old CPU utilization used to be around 20-25% on average. now my average CPU util is around 5-10%. i just recently purchased another strip of 1gig memory. this computer was really cool & quiet until i plugged in my Geforce 5200 PCI & noisy Gigabyte Geforce 6600GT, plus 160gig of seagate IDE drive. after playing a bit of 3D games(doom 3), the heatsink on this Venice core was still at around or below my skin temperature. the heatsink is usually the coldest part of the computer. AMD 64 has the cool & quiet technology acts (to me) exactly like the intel speed step on my Pentium M laptop. this 3500 CPU steps from a max of 2.2gig to min of 1gig frequency. it saves power(machine comes with a 300Watt Power supply), reduces heat.... and from what i can tell, the cpu runs cooler than my PentiumM 1.6 inspiron 600m laptop i am not using 64bits portion of the CPU, which makes me a bit uneasy. it probably will not run anything 64bits until its replaced to act as a linux server of some kind.
I'm using the X2 3800 and it is hands down the best processor I have ever used. I run Cybertrader Pro (30 windows),avast antivirus,and farcry 64 bit all day and never experience any slow down or hesitation whatsoever. Temperature averages 32C. Extremely fast for video editing.
>>this 3500 CPU steps from a max of 2.2gig to min of 1gig frequency.>> A nice utility is RM, RightMark CPU Clock Utility. http://cpu.rightmark.org/products/rmclock.shtml