Date:
Thursday , March 18, 2004
Author:
Kyle Bennett
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AthlonFX-53

We run the latest AMD flagship processor through the benchmarks.

Introduction

Today AMD is launching the second CPU in the Athlon FX series. With the roll out of the FX-53, clocked at 2.4GHz, the FX-51, clocked at 2.2GHz will be retired from service. While there will certainly be some overlap of the two CPUs in the market place, don't expect much. Few FX-53s have been seen in the wild as of yet and from what we have been told, there are very few on the way to retailers in PIB (Processor In a Box) form. With that said, do not expect the release of the FX-53 to force any big price dips in the FX-51 part. The AthlonFX will remain the flagship CPU with flagship prices to match.

If you are looking for the full run down on the AthlonFX processors, please check out our leading article on the subject. Today we are going to focus solely on the performance of the CPU with as little verbiage as possible.

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AthlonFX-53 Testing

Our FX-53 supports Dual Channel DDR400, this is what we tested with using some of the highest performance Ram we could find using Registered DIMMs from Mushkin. They have a write up here that covers some of the basics of the memory needed for AthlonFX CPUs. All CPUs were tested with DDR400 with low latencies.

Test Setup

AthlonFX-53, AthlonFX-51 - Asus SK8V (VIA K8T800 w/ 4.51 Hyperion Drivers ), 1GB (2x512MB) Muskin DDR400 ECC Registered DDR400 (2,3,2,5), ATI 9800XT (ATI Catalyst 3.8 drivers), 40GB Maxtor ATA133 HDD, Windows XP w/SP1 and DX9B.

Athlon64 3400+, A64 3000+ - MSI K8T Neo (VIA K8T800 w/ 4.51 Hyperion Drivers), 1GB (2x512MB) Kingston PC3500 HyperX DDR400 (2,3,2,5), ATI 9800XT (ATI Catalyst 3.8 drivers), 40GB Maxtor ATA133 HDD, Windows XP w/SP1 and DX9B.

Pentium 4 Extreme Edition 3.2GHz & 3.4GHz, Pentium 4 3.2C & 3.2E - Intel D875PBZ (i875P w/ .1012 Intel Inf Drivers ), 1GB (2x512MB) Kingston PC3500 HyperX DDR400 (2,2,2,5), ATI 9800XT (ATI Catalyst 3.8 drivers), 40GB Maxtor ATA133 HDD, Windows XP w/SP1 and DX9B.

Memory Bandwidth

SiSoft Sandra Memory Bandwidth Benchmark

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Keep in mind that our Athlon64 CPUs use single channel memory, while the AthlonFX and Pentium 4 CPUs take advantage of dual channel memory subsystems.

Not surprisingly, we see the AthlonFX again take top honors in this synthetic benchmark besting its own FX-51 score by 120MB/sec. Obviously the increased clock speed allows the CPU to simply do more work and that work is still easily supplied by the memory bus as it is far from saturated in theory.