Granted we’ve been on AMD’s case lately, but because some of the flak they’ve been getting from us we were contacted by a large oem that offered to supply us with an Athlon 64 FX processor, running at, brace yourselves, a whopping 2.2GHz clockspeed. To quote the oem ‘you’ll be truly impressed by the performance of the Athlon 64 FX, we simply could not find anything wrong with it’. And to be honest neither could we, as we’ve put the processor through it’s paces on the excellent SK8N motherboard Asus provided us with recently. We’ve clocked in about eight hours of benchmarking and stress testing with it already and we found that our similarly configured 3.06GHz Pentium 4 was no match for the Athlon 64. In many cases the Athlon 64 FX bested it by 40 to 50%.
Fig 1. The Athlon 64 FX processor, using the same socket-940 as the AMD Opteron.
Fig 2. The Athlon 64 FX fitted into the Asus SK8N, Nforce 3 Pro 150 chipset, motherboard.
Naturally there’s much more to tell, more than we can hope to get across in this daily column. We just wanted to let you know that it’s a frenzy in our labs with harddisks and cpu cooler fans spinning as we put both the Pentium 4 and the Athlon 64 up against each other in something which is best described as a heated battle. We’ll be sure to update the frontpage when we’re done with the evaluation, which will be either somewhere today or tomorrow, so do check back if you want to learn more about the Athlon FX’ performance and how it fares against Intel’s Pentium 4.
