Man, kudos, THAT's a comprehensive comparison.
I just VERY CHEAPLY got hold of an A64 3200+, board and RAM combo. Mainly bought it just because it went for very little money. And I've always wondered if it's worth upgrading my high-res W98 gaming rig (currently XP 2800+ / Radeon 850 AGP - yeah I know, that Radeon is needlessly fast, but I had it lying around) with a little beefier CPU.

Top notch Athlon XPs are ridiculously expensive, so I thought: Maybe it's worth testing out the A64-family. No need to test anymore, THANKS! I will swap boards right away...

In my case, Athlon 64 ended up in Zalman Z9 Plus. https://www.newegg.com/zalman-atx-mid-tower-s … N82E16811235027

• PSU at the bottom
• FDD drive bay
• semi-modern mesh case with a lot of airflow
• max 290mm GPU length

It's cooled by Thermaltake MaxOrb. https://www.techpowerup.com/59269/thermaltake … cooler-unveiled

Athlon 64 3200+ CPU is a good start, but you should look out for a cheap 3400+. I originally considered building Athlon XP, but then decided to go with Athlon 64 as I expected it to be a little better, while not much newer.

VGApocalypse wrote on 2026-01-27, 13:34:

Man, kudos, THAT's a comprehensive comparison.
I just VERY CHEAPLY got hold of an A64 3200+, board and RAM combo. Mainly bought it just because it went for very little money. And I've always wondered if it's worth upgrading my high-res W98 gaming rig (currently XP 2800+ / Radeon 850 AGP - yeah I know, that Radeon is needlessly fast, but I had it lying around) with a little beefier CPU.

Top notch Athlon XPs are ridiculously expensive, so I thought: Maybe it's worth testing out the A64-family. No need to test anymore, THANKS! I will swap boards right away...

Thank you.
Be very careful with windows 98 and pci-express; better stick to AGP.

In a little over a year I managed to test all major chipsets and all Athlon 64 revisions for socket 754 with 2 top of the line AGP cards and one pci-express equivalent. Nforce4 and implicitly Windows NT 5.X - that means XP most of the time - is the platform of choice for anyone wanting to build a socket 754 system.
I did not tested Sempron because it would be useless - prices for Athlon 64 are comparable and it would be a waste of money and what is far more precious - time.
While I consider that everything I wanted to do with the version 754 of the battle of the platforms I have done it, socket 754 and Athlon 64 have one more battle in front of them with its younger brother!
This topic remains open for anyone wanting to share their experiences with the first consumer Athlon 64 socket and discuss all problems related to it.

My very special research workstation was a socket 754 with Radeon 9700 Pro. It never crashed, and when you consider how much effort is lost when a PC crashes, it has to be arguably the most efficient PC I ever had.

Apple had been reorientated to be UNIX-like. My box was assembled running FreeBSD with GNUStep and other bits to be UNIX-like. The two were philosophically and architecturally comparable. PC-BSD were tackling a lot of the same challenges, so I tracked their experimental platform too. I still have the PC-BSD HDD, barely written to, but it was powered on for years and was my home entertainment box.

Just a quick info for all those enthusiastic Win98-guys (like me 😉 who may like to use an Athlon 64 for building a high performance rig:

I've now successfully swapped my 2800+ AthlonXP based build to a Athlon64 3200+ onboard an ASUS K8V-F, based on the VIA K8T-800 chipset. But it came with a few ceveats at first.
First of all I needed to downgrade the BIOS from 1007 to 1005 to accomplish a reinstall of Windows 98SE. Somehow ASUS ditched something (I don't know what, but the Win98SE setup froze randomly) related to Win98SE functionality in newer BIOS revisions. I did not know about this workaround (WinXP installed flawlessly with 1007) until I read about that fix somewhere on another forum. Maybe worth to note here, too.

I tried a lot with different chipset drivers from VIA directly. DO NOT DO THIS. Save your time (and a Win98 reinstall) and go for the Win98-drivers from the ASUS website. They work like a charm.

Maybe that's a whole other thing with nForce chipsets, I don't know. But the VIA K8T-800 (or just my board?) is clearly on the edge of supporting Win98 flawlessly. Took almost an entire day to get this thing up and running perfectly.

But finally, I think of it as a worthy upgrade, regarding my (still) overpowered Radeon X850. Benches deliver 15-20% increases in 1280x1024 (my mostly used resolution). Would recommend this upgrade, at least if I would have previously known what to do exactly.

Congrants on getting it work in Windows 98, as you say s754 is on the edge. Some boards which don't have old enough official BIOSes may require flashing from other similar boards with the same chipset from the same manufacturer. In such case Clawhammers are the best as they should work fine with old BIOSes.

Athlon 64 can also be downclocked. Try ESS Solo-1 PCI, it would be interesting to see if DOS sound works as well on VIA K8T-800.

Many thanks to nd22 for finding the time and money to test so many configurations for us.

AlexZ wrote on 2026-01-30, 17:26:

Athlon 64 can also be downclocked. Try ESS Solo-1 PCI, it would be interesting to see if DOS sound works as well on VIA K8T-800.

Many thanks to nd22 for finding the time and money to test so many configurations for us.

Huge thanks indeed.

For the sake of all retro gods I could not get my SB-Live 1024 from the previous build to fly in Win98SE. Boot takes a happy 10 minutes with drivers installed, sound gets distorted after some minutes of gameplay. Works fine in XP (dualboot) though.
Yet onboard sound does the trick in both OSes. Sounds quite good, too.

DOS isn't exactly a priority for this build, as the fan on top of the X850 thinks it's a reincarnation of a jet engine as long as the windows driver tells it otherwise.

I got some other PCI based soundcards with DOS support somewhere in the drawers (not sure wich rn, as I rarely use them). I will try out some over the weekend.

On Abit nf8, kv8, ku8 windows me installed without any problems, regardless of the BIOS version used.
I tested last night creative live sb0100 on all 3 boards and it was recognized on the spot.
From my point of view this is the end of the road for windows 9x. Already it does not feel right; on abit kw7 it seems just right and I can not "see" the difference between athlon XP and athlon 64.

Before wrapping up this topic I tried last night an increase in FSB without touching the voltages - I let them on AUTO. I used Abit NV8 - nforce4 platform as it is the best overall for the socket.
With the clawhammer 3400 at FSB 210 the system froze on startup; at 209 it entered Windows and i could run super pi and cinebench 2003. The differences were however very small, only 4%!
With Newcastle installed i could get past 210 and i tried up to 215 however the system was stable only at 212 FSB. The difference was noticeable this time around in super pi and cinebench.
Of course being stupid I forgot to take a few screenshots.
This is the final table with all the results:

My Clawhammer 3400+ does appear to work at 2.4Ghz without voltage change, brief 15 minutes prime95 run didn't reveal errors, I could run benchmarks and games without crashing but I opted not to use it like that as there were occasional issues in Windows XP like taking too long to shut down for no reason. The system would not boot with hypertransport set to 1000 in BIOS, so while OCing it I made sure for it to stay at about 900. I used a higher base frequency like 240-250 and low multiplier. The motivation was to have DDR400 memory speed without OCing it to be close to real 3700+.

The small bump in performance is not worth it to run at 2.4Ghz or buy 3700+. I also prefer not to put more strain on old boards for extended period. I saw recently another Gigabyte GA-K8NE sold locally.

I do have a few benchmark results written down for 3700+ rating and GeForce 9800 GT (stock clocks):

3D Mark 2000, GeForce 9800GT

• Ahlon64 3400+, 1024x768 32bit - 23503
• Ahlon64 3700+, 1024x768 32bit - 24988

3D Mark 2001, GeForce 9800GT

• Ahlon64 3400+, 1024x768 32bit - 27622
• Ahlon64 3700+, 1024x768 32bit - 28580

3D Mark 2003, GeForce 9800GT

• Ahlon64 3400+, 1024x768 32bit - 29165
• Ahlon64 3700+, 1024x768 32bit - 29612

3D Mark 2005, GeForce 9800GT

• Ahlon64 3400+, 1024x768 32bit - 10636
• Ahlon64 3700+, 1024x768 32bit - 11258

3D Mark 2006, GeForce 9800GT

• Ahlon64 3400+, 1024x768 32bit - 6090
• Ahlon64 3700+, 1024x768 32bit - 6480

AlexZ wrote on 2026-02-04, 08:16:

The small bump in performance is not worth it to run at 2.4Ghz or buy 3700+. I also prefer not to put more strain on old boards […]
Show full quote

The small bump in performance is not worth it to run at 2.4Ghz or buy 3700+. I also prefer not to put more strain on old boards for extended period. I saw recently another Gigabyte GA-K8NE sold locally.

I do have a few benchmark results written down for 3700+ rating and GeForce 9800 GT (stock clocks):

3D Mark 2000, GeForce 9800GT

• Ahlon64 3400+, 1024x768 32bit - 23503
• Ahlon64 3700+, 1024x768 32bit - 24988

3D Mark 2001, GeForce 9800GT

• Ahlon64 3400+, 1024x768 32bit - 27622
• Ahlon64 3700+, 1024x768 32bit - 28580

3D Mark 2003, GeForce 9800GT

• Ahlon64 3400+, 1024x768 32bit - 29165
• Ahlon64 3700+, 1024x768 32bit - 29612

3D Mark 2005, GeForce 9800GT

• Ahlon64 3400+, 1024x768 32bit - 10636
• Ahlon64 3700+, 1024x768 32bit - 11258

3D Mark 2006, GeForce 9800GT

• Ahlon64 3400+, 1024x768 32bit - 6090
• Ahlon64 3700+, 1024x768 32bit - 6480

Exactly my thoughts! It makes no sense to risk damaging a precious Abit board just for a 5% increase in scores! If you really need the extra performance better build yourself a socket 939 system!
Unfortunately my geforce 9800 gtx is a 2 slot card and installing it in the system will block off all 4 SATA ports! Abit NV8 has a idiotic placement of the main PCI-express connector low on the board. My strongest 1 slot video card is the radeon x1950 pro that I used for all the tests.