The Athlon XP 3200+ will probably be the last Barton-core desktop processor to come from AMD before the launch later this year of the Athlon 64, its desktop 64-bit processor.

There's not a great deal of difference with this chip compared to the last crop of Athlon XPs, as the clock-speed increase from 2.17GHz (Athlon XP 2700+, 2800+, 3000+) to 2.2GHz with the 3200+ is small and makes for negligible performance gains.
 
The most important differentiator is the 3200+'s 400MHz frontside bus (FSB). This theoretically ups the performance matrix from the previous chip's 333MHz FSB, but at the moment there's not a great deal of a boost.

Support at the time of writing for the 400MHz FSB was sketchy to say the least, so early adopters beware. Motherboards based on SiS's 748 and NVIDIA's nForce2 400 chipsets should be available by the time you read this, but from our early testing they weren't always stable.
 
We managed to squeeze some impressive benchmarks out of the processor. We tested the chip on the only board from our Labs test that could run it happily; the Gigabyte 7NNXP.
 
This board supports dual-channel DDR400, so you can pack a lot of RAM around your chip. We also bundled the board with an ATI RADEON 9800 PRO, and the 3DMark2001SE Pro scores they returned were phenomenal. It was no slouch in 2D either, with a SYSmark score of 249.

If you're looking for a chip and must have the latest then go right ahead and buy, but for our money we'd hold off until 400MHz FSB support stabilises.