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AMD’s Athlon 64 FX-57 Launched and Reviewed

Reviews of the Fastest Microprocessor for Gamers Emerge

by Yaroslav Lyssenko

[ 06/28/2005 | 10:22 PM ]

Advanced Micro Devices has launched its single-core AMD Athlon 64 FX-57 central processing unit that is aimed at gamers and enthusiasts. The new chip raises the performance bar set by its predecessor Athlon 64 FX-55 microprocessor, which was considered to be the most powerful gaming CPU on the planet. Although the chip is available from AMD for $1031, which is the highest price for an AMD Athlon 64-series product, the interest for details of the newest “king of the hill” is as big as ever.

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“AMD is increasing the speed of their highest performing CPU today. The Athlon FX-57 is a 200MHz bump from the current FX-55, brining the clock speed of the highest performing single core CPU on the market to 2.8GHz. This modest 7.7% increase is not the be all, end all of speed bumps, but AMD is still in a much better position than Intel for extracting performance by tacking on an extra 200MHz. Intel’s successive 200MHz increases on Prescott since it’s existence have increased performance by smaller and smaller amounts 2.8 GHz to 3.8 GHz is a 35.7% increase in clock speed, which should be an overestimate of performance barring cache size increases. If we look at AMD’s performance improvements from 1.8 GHz to 2.8 GHz, the upper bound on our performance increase is greater than 55%, plus any improvement for doubling cache size,” writes AnandTech.

“The San Diego core brings with it some very important things. Primarily, it has what AMD terms as a “more flexible memory controller.” We at HardOCP would prefer to call it a “fixed memory controller.” “Fixed” as in the older one was broken. The older memory controller had substantial issues with low latency RAM and certain configurations over 2GB. Given the nature of this high end CPU, it settles better with us now that it is able to support high-end memory configurations correctly. This is not a moment too soon as we are starting to see games that might very well benefit from memory configurations up to 2GB,” writes HardOCP.

“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,” concludes Ilya Gavrichenkov, X-bit labs’ hardware editor.