The Last Athlon XP (PCGH Retro, May 13th)

… 2003: He made AMD great and taught Intel to fear: the K7 processor, better known as the Athlon. Shortly before the well-deserved replacement by the more modern K8 architecture (Opteron, Athlon 64) with its 64-bit technology, AMD is presenting one last Athlon of the XP series on May 13th, the model 3200+ with Barton core, 400MHz FSB and 2200MHz core clock. AMD self-confidently praises the chip as fastest desktop processor in the world – which it was, at least in some benchmarks. The 3200+ is thus a fitting farewell to a successful architecture.

… 2003: At the same time, Nvidia and Via are presenting suitable chipsets for the new processor, the Nforce 2 400/Ultra 400 and the KT600, making it clear that the K7 is far from dead. Years later, the 3200+ is still popular – as a last resort for many millions of socket A boards. Among connoisseurs, the Socket-A is still considered the ultimate in building the fastest possible PCs for Voodoo graphics cards. In particular, the AXP Mobile processors 2500+ and 2600+, which are equipped with a lower operating voltage (“Vcore”), are very popular due to their OC potential.