Another month, another speed bump from AMD. But when I’m dealing with super-high-end expensive gamingtargeted processors, do I care? Of course I do. Enter the new AMD Athlon 64 FX- 57. I apologize right now for those of you with the FX-55 that was top of the charts for a few weeks. It’s still silly fast but not quite as fast as this replacement. Based upon the very successful Athlon 64 939-pin platform, and with 1MB of L2 cache at its disposal (as is the norm for these FX’s), the FX-57 clocks at 2.8GHz. AMD is rapidly approaching the 3GHz mark that Intel set sometime ago, but the only difference is that, clock for clock, the boys in green are so much more efficient in almost every department. AMD didn’t just bump up the clock speed by 200MHz for the FX-57 over the FX-55, it threw in a few extra tweaks for even more performance. You certainly get what you pay for when spending around $1,000 (actually $1,031 in quantities per thousand) on a CPU. But who in his right mind would do such a thing anyway? The introduction of the FX-57 will not mean the death of the FX-55, and even the price remains the same at $827, so you need not feel too bad if you shelled out that amount recently. However it’s rather odd for the price to remain stagnant, especially forAMD, and it certainly won’t please AMD enthusiasts that have supported the company through thick and thin. The core itself is a revised K8 core (codenamed San Diego) with a die shrink thrown in for good measure, down from 130nm to 90nm. It’s similar to previous Athlon 64 X2 cores based on the San Diego, with all of the same E-K8 revisions with both SOI process and Dual Stress Liner technologies. The die shrink obviously helps FX processors run faster, suck up less power, and even cost less to manufacture than the 130nm cores. The FX-57 can achieve its increased clock speed while maintaining the same 104-watt TDP as the FX-55 (in large part due to this die shrink), and the nominal core voltage sits at 1.4 volts. Having said that, I didn’t have any real luck overclocking the FX-57, which was disappointing considering the die shrink. It kind of ran at 3GHz with improved cooling, but perhaps later revisions will run above and beyond that mark more stably. As with other Rev E chips, the FX-57 AMD has SSE3 instructions, along with a more flexible memory controller (letting you use different size DIMMs on the same channel) and improved memory mapping (more efficient use of memory space) and loading (you can now populate memory with double-bank DIMMs with no sacrifice in performance).
My benchmarks helped to demonstrate how potent the FX-line remains at gaming. No Intel CPU can come close in that department. Games such as UT2004 or Painkiller are especially CPU-bound and benefit from the bumps that FX-57 provides; of course any FX processor performs extremely well and it just depends on how badly you want those bragging rights. Furthermore, just when I thought playing Battlefield 2 with a dual-core X2 and SLI 7800 GTX cards was the “right” thing to do for the price, the performance figures bring me back down to my gaming roots. Yes folks, the FX-57 is fast, and it absolutely makes me forget about all things multithreaded; therefore, I would say that 99.9% of you should go for the more forward-looking dual-core technology in the form of the Athlon 64 X2 4800+, especially since it’s so much more affordable. However, for that 1% that needs 1,500HP, a two-stage nitrous setup, and single-digit quarter-mile runs for gaming, go for the FX-57. Just remember that it’s part of a dying breed in terms of single-core processors.
My benchmarks helped to demonstrate how potent the FX-line remains at gaming. No Intel CPU can come close in that department. Games such as UT2004 or Painkiller are especially CPU-bound and benefit from the bumps that FX-57 provides; of course any FX processor performs extremely well and it just depends on how badly you want those bragging rights. Furthermore, just when I thought playing Battlefield 2 with a dual-core X2 and SLI 7800 GTX cards was the “right” thing to do for the price, the performance figures bring me back down to my gaming roots. Yes folks, the FX-57 is fast, and it absolutely makes me forget about all things multithreaded; therefore, I would say that 99.9% of you should go for the more forward-looking dual-core technology in the form of the Athlon 64 X2 4800+, especially since it’s so much more affordable. However, for that 1% that needs 1,500HP, a two-stage nitrous setup, and single-digit quarter-mile runs for gaming, go for the FX-57. Just remember that it’s part of a dying breed in terms of single-core processors.
