AMD Athlon 64 FX-60 Hands-On

By Sarju Shah

Since it first debuted in 2003, AMD's FX series of CPUs stood for pure gaming performance. Featuring the highest clock speeds that AMD had to offer, the FX line is known for blistering frame rates and equally scorching prices. One common thread links all the FX CPUs together, though; they've all been single-core processors. The new AMD Athlon 64 FX-60 changes everything as AMD is now bringing multi-core processing to the FX line.

Built on a 90nm SOI process, the Athlon 64 FX-60 features two 2.6GHz processors on a single package. Down in the nitty-gritty, each core gets 128KB of L1 cache, as well as 1024KB of L2 cache, yielding a total of 256KB of L1 cache, and 2048KB of L2 cache for the processor as a whole. And as the "Athlon 64" moniker suggests, the FX-60 is 64-bit compatible.

AMD released a full lineup of dual-core Athlon 64 X2 CPUs in mid-2005, but refrained from moving the FX lineup to the dual-core platform due to performance concerns. At that time, dual-core CPUs offered excellent overall performance, but single-core CPUs still reigned supreme when it came to gaming performance since PC games didn't take advantange of multi-core processors and single-core CPUs had faster overall clock speeds.

The year 2006 promises to be the year when games will actually start to utilize multi-core CPUs. Most modern games only use one processor, but with all the consoles headed for multi-core processing, a PC armed with an FX-60 sits poised to take advantage of the coming shift to multithreaded gaming. Just recently, the developers for Quake 4 and Call of Duty 2 released patches to let the games take advantage of multi-core CPUs. These games demonstrate that multi-core processing can offer performance improvement, but, with percentage increases averaging only 5-15%, the real gains are yet to come.

Upgrades should prove simple; the FX-60 is compatible with nearly all socket 939-based motherboards, including the popular Asus A8N SLI Deluxe. In contrast, Intel's newest Pentium Processor Extreme Edition 955, while pin-compatible with other LGA775 CPUs, will only function on motherboards based on its equally new 975X chipset, making that upgrade considerably more expensive.

As our tests indicate, the Athlon 64 FX-60's performance is breathtaking. In Quake 4, with multiprocessor features enabled, the FX-60 pulls far ahead of the competition. Interestingly, all the Athlon processors move ahead of Intel's Pentium EE 955 in the primary 3DMark05 graphics test, but the 955 takes a commanding lead in the CPU test. The FX-60 leads the pack in the multiprocessor-capable Windows Media Encoder 9 test, but when it comes to brute-force single-threaded encoding, the 2.8GHz Athlon 64 FX-57 leaves every other processor in the dust. However, the FX-57's victory proves to be short-lived when we look at the results of our multitasking encoding and gaming tests. Running two brutal single-threaded applications at the same time proves too much for the FX-57, and the FX-60 comes out on top, hardly giving up any performance while running 3DMark05 and PSP Video 9 simultaneously.

Look no further if you're looking for the pinnacle of desktop processing. AMD's Athlon 64 FX-60 is without a doubt a winner, but with a price tag of $1,031, it's going to be out of the price range of many.