AMD Athlon 64 FX-57: The Fastest Single Core
by Derek Wilson on June 27, 2005 11:47 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Final Words
Clearly the FX-57 is the fastest single core processor money can buy right now. But is it worth it?The price is exorbitant, the speed increase over previous FX processors is not extreme, and the industry is focused firmly on multiple core architectures. We are no longer at point in time where this launch is extremely important. The battles have been fought and AMD already won the fight for single threaded performance.
For end users who need a high performing single core, the 4000+ is quite capable and affords a savings of more than $550. For those who have the money to burn, the X2 4800+ costs just over $1000 as well and will provide smoother multitasking and higher performance in applications that only modestly benefit from multithreading.
The FX-57 isn't as overclockable as previous parts (based on our experience with one sample). Our FX-53 would easily run at 2.6GHz, and the FX-55 could run stable at 2.8GHz if we took extra care to keep it cool. Our FX-57 didn't even pretend to make it through our stability test at 3GHz.
There may be some corporation or individual who absolutely must have single core performance at all costs. In that situation, the FX-57 is the fastest option and the best fit. Of course, that demographic doesn't even show up on the radar. The real answer to our question is that the FX-57 is not worth the price. With options almost as fast at just about half the price or hardware that has the potential for more speed and a smoother experience priced the same, the choice for the desktop end user is clearly not the FX-57.
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fishbits - Monday, June 27, 2005 - link
"Why are you still doing Mozilla 1.4 testing?"Because this is a CPU review, and they already have a slew of other CPUs tested with Mozilla 1.4? Did you think they retested it on every chip each time they got a new chip in? This keeps it apples-to-apples so we can see the relative performance of the new contender against ones who've already been benchmarked.
Or was there a specific score you needed to see for a specific version of Firefox to make or break your personal decision on whether to buy the FX-57 or not?
AnandTech: Please continue to isolate the performance of the item being reviewed as much as practical. Last thing we need is extra hardware and software variables thrown in, until you're ready to move the whole gaggle over to a new set of yardsticks.
ravedave - Monday, June 27, 2005 - link
Good straight forward article. Not much text though, expect your avg page view times to be tiny.What happened to all the suggestions people gave
when Anand asked for tests for this article in his blog? Comon it's a speedbump, do something interesting.At least provide some slow old processor in the rankings so we can all laugh and point.
Backslider - Monday, June 27, 2005 - link
With Half-Life 2 being the most CPU dependant game, I was suprised to see it missing from the benches.acejj26 - Monday, June 27, 2005 - link
Let me be the first to offer my services as an editor for articles here. I hate seeing articles here marred by poor grammar, spelling errors, and errors in the graphs.Kocur - Monday, June 27, 2005 - link
blckgrffn,Yes, you are right that DDR400 low latency will be better than DDR500 with very relaxed timings. However, you can buy now DDR memory with really nice timings at PC4000 speeds. See the memory tests at Anandtech and how much does FX53 gain from faster memory speeds at reasonable timings:). The same would hold for FX57 even to greater extent.
Moreover, I think that FX57 should have been tested on a really good, mature platform, for example, DFI LP. You cannot use some crapy reference mobo until the socket 939 dies.
Kocur.
Tallon - Monday, June 27, 2005 - link
My god, my eyes are fucking bleeding.Losing: http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=losing
Loosing: http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=loosing
Please learn the difference.
blckgrffn - Monday, June 27, 2005 - link
Dear lord! Do you know nothing of A64's and latency! DDR400 LL will stomp DDR500 @ relaxed timings, no problem! Further more, the baseline needs to stay the same, so they can't switch mobo and ram for every review.Next, mozilla 1.4 ~ Firefox. It is MOZILLA FIREFOX. Let's use our brain for that one, in that paragraph you said didn't make anysense, he laid it out for you.
I do have one gripe - how can everything be slower at UT2k4 than Doom3? Tell me that was 1600*1200 w/aa&af! Otherwise, that benchmark should have much higher scores, imho....
Other than that and that weird fluke where the 57 lost to the 55 and 4000+, thanks for the great article, Derek :)
Kocur - Monday, June 27, 2005 - link
johnsonx,Well, it actually might be correct. Remember that they are using for this test the first old reference motherboard they got with FX55 last year. Thus, the results for other AMD processors come from October last year (well, at least for FX55). At that time they might have used another hard disk.
Look also at the wierd results of P4 670 in some office tests with regard to other Intel processors. This is clearly disk/controller issue.
Kocur.
DrMrLordX - Monday, June 27, 2005 - link
Agreed #16, it's odd that the FX-55 and 4000+ win the Communication Sysmark 2004 bench. The FX-57 should have taken it easily.johnsonx - Monday, June 27, 2005 - link
It seems a bit odd that the FX-57 looses to the FX-55 and 4000+ in the third benchmark.... perhaps the labels are mixed up?