AMD Athlon 64 FX-57: Sunny San Diego
Test System & Vital Signs
How we configured our test systems: When configuring the test systems for this showcase, we first entered system BIOSes and set each board to its "Optimized" or "High-Performance Defaults." The hard drives were then formatted, and Windows XP Professional (SP2) was installed. When the Windows installation was complete, we installed the rest of the necessary drivers and removed Windows Messenger from the system. Auto-Updating and System Restore were disabled, and we set up a 768MB permanent page file on the same partition as the Windows installation. Lastly, we set Windows XP's Visual Effects to "best performance," installed all of our benchmarking software, defragged the hard drives, and ran all of the tests.
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| SYSTEM 1: AMD Athlon 64 FX-57 (2.8GHz) AMD Athlon 64 FX-55 (2.6GHz) AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+ (2.4GHz) (Dual Core CPU) AMD Athlon 4000+ (2.4GHz) ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe (NVIDIA nForce 4 SLI) 2x512MB Corsair PC3200 Pro CL 2-2-2-5 GeForce 6800 GT On-board Ethernet On-board Audio WD "Raptor" HD 10,000 RPM SATA Windows XP Pro SP2 nForce 4 Drivers v6.53 NVIDIA Forceware v71.89 DirectX 9.0c |
SYSTEM 2: Pentium 4 670 - 3.8GHz Pentium 4 Extreme Edition (3.73GHz) Pentium Extreme Edition 840 (3.2GHz) (Dual Core CPU) ASUS P5ND2-SLI (nForce 4 SLI Intel Edition) 2x512MB Corsair DDR2-667 CL 3-2-2-7 GeForce 6800 GT On-board Ethernet On-board Audio WD "Raptor" HD 10,000 RPM SATA Windows XP Pro SP2 nForce 4 Drivers v7.02 NVIDIA Forceware v71.89 DirectX 9.0c |
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Before we put the new Athlon 64 FX-57 through its paces with our traditional suite of CPU benchmarks, we spent some time monitoring its thermal characteristics, and did a little overclocking to find out what kind of headroom was left in our particular sample. Using the hardware monitor built into NVIDIA's System Utility and a CPU-Z, we were able to capture some data points for all of you to feast your eyes upon...
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The Athlon 64 FX-57: Stock & Overclocked Vital Signs
As you can see in the scree-shot on the left, CPU-Z properly recognized the processor as an Athlon 64 FX-57, and shows that it's a .09 micron part based on the "San Diego" core. The specification section of CPU-Z lists the processor as an "FX-25", however, which was just a simple identification problem with our motherboard's BIOS. Other than that minor issue, the FX-57 worked flawlessly. By default, the processor required only 1.4v and was clocked at 2.8GHz, but in typical Asus fashion "default" voltages and speeds were goosed slightly (1.44v / 2821MHz) on our test-bed's A8N-SLI Deluxe motherboard.
If you direct your eyes to the NVMonitor portions of the screens, you'll see that the Athlon 64 FX-57 ran as cool as a cucumber (relatively speaking) while resting at idle, and didn't break much of a sweat while running with a 100% load either. At idle the FX-57 hummed along at a nice 38oC. And with Prime95 pounding on it for a while, the FX-57's temperature only jumped by 11C, and peaked at 49oC, which is a far cry from the toasty warm Pentium 4's we've seen hit temps around 65oC in the very same open-air test bench. Although Intel's recent Pentium 4 6XX sequence cores have made great strides thermally. Regardless, it certainly seems that AMD's .09 micron SOI manufacturing process is a perfect compliment for the Athlon 64's architecture. AMD doesn't seem to be having any trouble keeping temperatures in check, even with their highest-clocked CPU yet.
