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.

It is not a ragebait but, while I do understand that hunting for a mobile CPU in 2026 it's very expensive and/or difficult, what you can achieve with them is a bit better than 4% more performances, given the right motherboard and the right RAM modules, those are overclocking monsters imho.
Edit: while during its days the most overclocked platform was probably NForce4 on 939 Athlon64, you can achieve great overclock results with nforce3 on 754 mobile Athlon64 and still keep win98 SE full compatibility. Sadly for many of its boards and BIOS revisions ABIT refused to support that CPU family. Turion64 ML and MT are still cheap and available and they work nicely and overclock well even if not as well as the late mobiles. Overclocking these CPUs does not put so much stress on the motherboard chipset which works almost in spec (given the 'right' bios settings) the stressed components are mostly RAM and CPU. You said you want to experience the 754 software era at the top of its capabilities, so in my opinion hunting for a reasonably priced mobile/turion64 could bring a nice boost to this neglected 754 socket.

The question is: what would you gain by overclocking a 20+ years old system?
Better performance in games? Unlikely as the main bottleneck is the video card and not the CPU.
Bragging rights on the forum? I don't want them.
I am happy with my collection and i hope to use it for many,many years to come. I hope I can do a few more tests to ascertain the performance of the parts in period correct benchmarks in the years to come.

nd22 wrote on 2026-03-24, 08:51:

The question is: what would you gain by overclocking a 20+ years old system? Better performance in games? Unlikely as the main […]
Show full quote

The question is: what would you gain by overclocking a 20+ years old system?
Better performance in games? Unlikely as the main bottleneck is the video card and not the CPU.
Bragging rights on the forum? I don't want them.
I am happy with my collection and i hope to use it for many,many years to come. I hope I can do a few more tests to ascertain the performance of the parts in period correct benchmarks in the years to come.

It is fun if you were there 20 years ago trying to reach that dream overclock, sockets 754 & 939 were some of the most entertaining and overclock-worthy platforms 😉 , other than that a Turion64 is way more power efficient than a NewCastle (even more than a Venice) even at stock, you have no IHS with dried up paste inside it, you can stress the mobo VRM way less, have the same performances, larger L2 cache, SSE3 support if you care, underclocks on the fly in the OS and remains stable for speed sensitive games and if you fancy the OC you can still enjoy it (it really depends on the overclock and on the gpu you are going to use, especially if you want a Win98SE top performer, the OS is the limiting factor), you are still period correct. If you want XP top performer you can go to i7-3770k and a gtx 970 or anything in between. Just my opinion of course.

There isn't much point in overclock as you can just buy the next generation platform cheap. If someone really wants to use Turions they would be looking at Turion 64 ML-40, MT-40 or ML-44 with 1MB L2 cache. Motherboard support is not guaranteed and they may end up wasting money.

Turions are rare as AMD laptop market segment was very small back then and people buying AMD laptops wouldn't be buying with the best CPU as they didn't last long on battery.

AlexZ wrote on 2026-03-24, 10:22:

There isn't much point in overclock as you can just buy the next generation platform cheap. If someone really wants to use Turions they would be looking at Turion 64 ML-40, MT-40 or ML-44 with 1MB L2 cache. Motherboard support is not guaranteed and they may end up wasting money.

Turions are rare as AMD laptop market segment was very small back then and people buying AMD laptops wouldn't be buying with the best CPU as they didn't last long on battery.

It really depends if you like to overclock, it has nothing to do with what you can cheaply buy, ML-34 has 1MB cache and they are great performers, even at stock (basically a 3200+) and they cost 10 euros on ebay. There are a good numbers of motherboards with bios that supports them, if you do some digging on various forums, you can find that someone has already done the compatibility selection for you, but I'm not going to insist, if you prefer not to use them in a desktop, it is probably the better choice. But it is not a mere 4% if you decide to overclock, even in this thread some efforts in OC were done if I'm not mistaken.

Let's be more specific and post here links to websites with Turion compatibility list.

ML-34 is quite low clocked, just 1.8Ghz and as a result not the best silicon for running at 2.4Ghz. When it comes to Turion 64 ML-40, MT-40 or ML-44, they are virtually nonexistent.

AlexZ wrote on 2026-03-24, 11:30:

Let's be more specific and post here links to websites with Turion compatibility list.

ML-34 is quite low clocked, just 1.8Ghz and as a result not the best silicon for running at 2.4Ghz. When it comes to Turion 64 ML-40, MT-40 or ML-44, they are virtually nonexistent.

It is a Lancaster core at 90 nm working at 1.35V, which were basically the best binned Newark cores for lower wattage requirements, that silicon has the same form factor of a standard 754 CPU without the IHS and 20 years old thermal paste inside the IHS, it has enough thermal headroom (in a desktop) to beat any 130 nm cpu if overclocked, even on air cooling, it is the same as the infamous k6-2+ or k6-3+, they overclock much better than the standard k6-3 version for that reason. Even back then was a famous desktop cpu replacement between enthusiasts who wanted to prolong their 754 motherboard life. There are OC forums still up that talks about that or there is web archive if you want to dig even deeper.

Ok so let's be more specific, please add links to those web archives/forums with relevant data.