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| AMD Athlon64-FX57 The Cost of Speed | |
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(Review by MS June 27, 2005) |
| AMD Athlon 64 3800+ (Venice) |
Prime95
In this case, only a single instance of Prime95 is running, whereas in all dual core CPUs two separate instances are working in tandem and in the case of the P4 840 EE we launched up to four separate Prime95 threads
Interestingly, the FX57 draws almost as much power as the X2-4800 in this particular benchmark.
Final Thoughts
Speedbumps of existing CPU architectures are usually rather uneventful in terms of the actual benchmark results and the FX57 does not make an exception here. The scores fall into the right places, and the FX57 shows some definite punch in basically all single threaded applications.
What was somewhat surprising is the power consumption of the FX57 at 2800 MHz. To a certain degree, our results scaled with the expectations based on the Venice overclocking numbers but there are enough numbers that are going way beyond what we would have projected. Interestingly, the core voltage was found to be only 1.4V, which is lower than what we saw with the overclocked Venice - in that case, the Vre automatically scaled up to 1.48 - 1.5V. Aside from the raw power measurements, there is the issue of the fan speed and compared to the Venice and Winchester, the San Diego gets us somewhat back to medieval times, in other words, the same fans are quite a bit louder on the FX57 than they are on the 3800+ or even on the 4800+.
Overclocking
Yes, it is possible to overclock the FX57 a bit beyond the 2800 MHz default, we ran the CPU at 3 GHz without problems but in all honesty, it is getting to the point where it really does not matter anymore except for bragging rights.
To wrap it up, it seems that AMD has achieved the goal of coming out with a killer CPU with respect to performance but that performance has its price in terms of power consumption and by extension cooling requirements / noise. My personal take is that not only from a price / performance standpoint but also in the interest of quiet computing, the "entrylevel 4200+ or 4400+ are the better choices, for the budget oriented, even the standard garden variety Venice or SanDiego core based CPUs may be more desirable.
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Athlon64 X2-4200+ (dual core) |
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