AMD Athlon 64 FX-57: Sunny San Diego

We can't very well paint a complete picture of the Athlon 64 FX-57's full potential for you, without pushing the new core to its limits, so we overclocked our CPU by increasing it's stock 14X multiplier to 15X.  We also attempted to reach higher speeds through increasing the chip's HT link to 220+MHz but that yielded similar results with less stability overall, since this also affected memory bus speeds.  In addition, raising core voltages above 1.5V only added to the instability, so in the end we settled on a conservative stock voltage setting as our reference point for overclocking.

Athlon 64 FX-57 Overclocking Experiment 3GHz - Air Cooled, Stable

Throughout all of our overclocking efforts, a Zalman 7000B Cu cooler was installed on the A64 FX-57 CPU, and the test system was setup in an open-air environment on our lab bench.

When all was said and done, we were able to push our particular Athlon 64 FX-57 to a rather impressive 3.02GHz, and increase in clock speed of over 200MHz. We ran a couple of SANDRA's Processor and Multimedia benchmarks while the system was overclocked to give you a basic idea as to how the system performed, and have the results posted above. With the CPU running at a clock speed of over 3GHz, absolutely nothing in SANDRA's database of reference systems could come close in ALU performance, and only the higher clocked Pentium 4's with HT enabled were able to outpace our overclocked FX-57 in FPU performance, because these particular tests are multi-threaded. 

Preliminary Benchmarks with SiSoft SANDRA 2005 Synthetic Testing

We began our stock testing on the new Athlon 64 FX-57 with SiSoftware's SANDRA, the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. SANDRA consists of a set of information and diagnostic utilities that can provide a host of useful information about your hardware and operating system. We ran four of the built-in subsystem tests that partially comprise the SANDRA 2005 suite (CPU, Multimedia, Cache, and Memory) with the Athlon 64 FX-57 installed into our test rig.  All of the scores reported below were taken with the processor and memory running at their respective default clock speeds of 2.8GHz and 200MHz CAS 2, 2, 2, 5 DDR Corsair Memory.

CPU Arithmetic Benchmark Athlon 64 FX-57

Multimedia Benchmark Athlon 64 FX-57

Memory Benchmark Athlon 64 FX-57

The Athlon 64 FX-57 completed all of our SANDRA benchmarks as we had expected it to. With this being the highest clocked Athlon 64 processor released to date, we expected the FX-57 to smoke all of the singe-CPU reference numbers in integer performance (ALU), and true to form only the HT enabled Pentium 4 processors should post better floating-point numbers (FPU), which is exactly what happened in the Processor Arithmetic and Multimedia tests. In the Memory Bandwidth Benchmark though, the FX-57 with its revamped memory controller also performed very well, hovering at or around the 6GB/s mark in both portions of the test.