Testbed and Methods

During this test session we will compare the performance of our today’s hero, dual-core AMD Athlon 64 FX-60 processor, against the performance of the top processors with single-core and dual-core architecture from AMD and Intel. In other words, among the rivals will be the candidates from the following processor families: Athlon 64 FX, Athlon 64 X2, Pentium 4, Pentium 4 Extreme Edition, Pentium D and Pentium Extreme Edition.

During our test session we assembled a few testbeds with the following components:

• CPU:
• AMD Athlon 64 FX-60 (Socket 939, 2.6GHz, 2x1024KB L2 cache, E6 core revision – Toledo);
• AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+ (Socket 939, 2.4GHz, 2x1024KB L2 cache, E6 core revision – Toledo);
• AMD Athlon 64 FX-57 (Socket 939, 2.8GHz, 1024KB L2 cache, E4 core revision – San Diego);
• Intel Pentium Extreme Edition 955 (LGA775, 3.46GHz, 2x2MB L2);
• Intel Pentium D 950 (LGA775, 3.4GHz, 2x2MB L2);
• Intel Pentium Extreme Edition 840 (LGA775, 3.2GHz, 2x1MB L2);
• Intel Pentium 4 Extreme Edition 3.73GHz (LGA775, 3.73GHz, 2MB L2);
• Intel Pentium 4 670 (LGA775, 3.6GHz, 2MB L2).
• Mainboards:
• DFI LANParty UT NF4 Ultra-D (NVIDIA nForce4 Ultra);
• ASUS P5WD2 Premium (LGA775, Intel 955X Express).
• Memory:
• 2048MB DDR400 SDRAM (Corsair CMX1024-3500LLPRO, 2 x 1024 MB, 2-3-2-10);
• 2048MB DDR2-667 SDRAM (Corsair CM2X1024-6400PRO, 2 x 1024 MB, 4-4-4-12).
• Graphics card: NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GT 256MB (PCI-E x16).
• HDD: Maxtor MaXLine III 250GB (SATA150).
• OS: Microsoft Windows XP SP2 с DirectX 9.0c.

The BIOS Setup of the mainboards was adjusted for maximum performance.