AMD QuadFX Platform & FX-70 Series Processors

How we configured our test systems: When configuring our test systems for the following set of benchmarks, we first entered their respective system BIOSes and set each board to its "Optimized" or "High-Performance Defaults." We then saved the settings, re-entered the BIOS and set memory timings for DDR2-800 at 4,4,4,12 1T latency.  The hard drives were then formatted, and Windows XP Professional (SP2) was installed. When the Windows installation was complete, we installed the drivers necessary for our components, and removed Windows Messenger from the system. Auto-Updating and System Restore were then disabled, and we set up a 1024MB 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.

HotHardware's Test Systems AMD & Intel Inside!

We began our testing with SiSoftware's SANDRA XI, the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. We ran six of the built-in subsystem tests that partially comprise the SANDRA XI suite with the new QuadFX platform equipped with a pair of Athlon 64 FX-74 processors (CPU, Multimedia, Multi-Core Efficiency, Memory, Cache, and Memory Latency). All of the scores reported below were taken with the processors running at their default clock speeds of 3.0GHz.

Preliminary Testing with SiSoft SANDRA XI
Synthetic Benchmarks

AMD QuadFX Athlon 64 FX-74 @ 3.0GHz CPU Arithmetic	AMD QuadFX Athlon 64 FX-74 @ 3.0GHz MultiMedia	AMD QuadFX Athlon 64 FX-74 @ 3.0GHz Multi-Core Efficiency
AMD QuadFX Athlon 64 FX-74 @ 3.0GHz Memory Bandwidth	AMD QuadFX Athlon 64 FX-74 @ 3.0GHz Cache and Memory	AMD QuadFX Athlon 64 FX-74 @ 3.0GHz Memory Latency

In the CPU Arithmetic and Multimedia benchmarks, the QuadFX platform performed as expected; it was faster than a slightly lower clocked dual, dual-core Opteron system, but it couldn't quite compete with the quad-core Intel powered setups. According to the new multi-core efficiency benchmark, however, the QuadFX platform fares very well. Until block sizes hit a certain point, the QuadFX platform offered significantly more inter-core bandwidth than anything else. The QuadFX system also fared well in the Cache & Memory bandwidth, and in the standard memory bandwidth tests, but memory latency was actually higher than all of the other reference systems in SANDRA's database.

AMD QuadFX Athlon 64 FX-74 @ 3.0GHz Memory Bandwidth With Windows Vista Node Interleaving Enabled

AMD QuadFX Athlon 64 FX-74 @ 3.0GHz Memory Bandwidth With Windows Vista Node Interleaving Disabled

The six tests above were run with Windows XP Professional, but as we mentioned earlier, Windows Vista has native support for NUMA which can drastically affect performance. We ran a couple of memory bandwidth tests using the final build of Windows Vista with node interleaving enabled, and again with it disabled. With it enabled via the system BIOS, the QuadFX platform manages about 6.6GB/s of memory bandwidth. With node interleaving disabled in the BIOS though, SADNRA reports over 12GB/s of available memory bandwidth under Windows Vista.