X-bit labs

AMD Athlon 64 FX-57 Processor Review (page 13)

Category: CPU

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

[ 06/26/2005 | 03:15 PM ]

Conclusion

You must have been out of touch with the desktop processor market, if you have got any surprising information from this review. The Athlon 64 FX-57 has performed most expectedly in all our tests, yielding predictable performance, overclocking, and power consumption results. And we guess you won’t be surprised if we call the tested Athlon 64 FX-57 the best gaming processor for today. It also performs well in many other applications, by the way. In fact, this CPU is not the leader in two cases only. It is worse than dual-core processors in multi-threading applications and than CPUs of Intel’s NetBurst architecture at encoding audio and video content.

Considering these things, the Athlon 64 FX-57 is going to be a good choice for a games-oriented computer. An additional bonus is the non-locked multiplier that allows overclocking this processor easily, especially with extreme cooling methods. Note also that using AMD’s most progressive core for today (San Diego) the Athlon 64 FX-57 has some extra advantages over the previous models in this series. It has a higher overclocking potential, relatively low heat dissipation and power consumption, SSE3 instructions support, and an improved memory controller.

On the other hand, if you are not a dedicated gamer, you may want to consider a dual-core Athlon 64 X2 that shows itself brilliantly in multi-threading environments.

Well, this problem of choice between Athlon 64 FX and Athlon 64 X2 stands only for wealthy PC enthusiasts as yet: the manufacturer asks quite a lot of money – around $1000 – for a processor of that class. And this high price seems to be the main drawback of modern top CPU models from AMD.