This comes very well packaged from AMD, nice green box with plenty of room all around so the cpu doesnt get damaged, not only that but the cpu was in some foam and encased in a clear pastic container. From the offset you can tell AMD are serious about their products and want to make sure users will get their hands on working hardware.

CPU is clearly marked and labelled, so you can tell which way it will slot onto the socked of the motherboard, also it has its version, name and speed wrote on the CPU.

Some facts now, AMD performance rate their CPU's, what does this mean? well it means this a AMD 3000 will perform around the same level as an INTEL 3 gig chip. The CPU actually runs at 2.20 gig, the reason its performs so much better than its actually speed is the cache and the code on the actually CPU. The Athlon xp 3000+ has a 64k level 1 cache for instructions, a 64k level 1 cache for data and a 512k level 2 cache. Cache is important as its where instructions are passed by software/hardware for the CPU to deal with.

All in all the Athlon xp 3000+ is a very nice and powerful CPU, i was running one for a while and the performance in games was very good.

There was no patches needed for Windows Xp, most games didn't need patched either.

Also in the CPU box was the heatsink and fan, a mass of metal ready to draw heat of the CPU. CPU's run hot and the Athlon xp 3000+ is no exception, operating tempatures are around 40-50 degrees celcius.

For a long time i have used AMD over INTEL and with the quality of AMD CPU's i don't see that changing.

Installing the CPU is quick and pretty painless, of course Heatsink and fans are always a pain to install. The Labeling on the CPU means its very easy to see how it fits onto the socket.

Once its in and you have put the rest of the system together things really start to fly. This CPU will run todays software, there really isnt much out that needs a CPU thats much faster. Of course there is always games that push systems to the limits and will use faster CPU's but they will still run on the Athlon xp 3000+.

AMD CPUS are very nicely priced usually a lot cheaper than INTEL CPU's but don't let that fool you, these CPU's mean business and won't let you down.