X-bit labs

AMD Athlon 64 FX-60 CPU Review (page 7)

Category: CPU

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

[ 01/09/2006 | 09:01 PM ]

PCMark05

PCMark05 is another popular test suite for “general” system performance. Since it creates multi-threaded workload during work, the CPUs with two cores perform the best of all in it.

According to PCMark04, dual-core AMD processors perform the best here and leave behind Intel’s dual- and single-core CPUs. At the same time, I would like to point out that this conclusion is not valid for the performances of the overclocked Athlon 64 FX-60 and Pentium Extreme Edition 955. When we overclock these CPUs, the picture changes: Presler working at 4.26GHz shows better results than the 2.9GHz Toledo. However, there is nothing to be surprised with. We managed to overclock Pentium Extreme Edition 955 by 23% above the nominal, while the frequency of the AMD processor could increase by only 11.5% because of the older 90nm production technology.

The CPU subtest of the PCMark05 test is optimized for NetBurst architecture that is why Intel processors perform better there. As for the memory subsystem performance, we shouldn’t expect any significant improvement from AMD here, until the company launches their Socket M2 platform supporting the new prospective DDR2 SDRAM.