Date:
Monday , June 27, 2005
Author:
Kyle Bennett
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AMD Athlon 64 FX-57

The AX8 is ABIT’s latest VIA-based Athlon 64 board. Overclocking quirks aside, this board performed surprisingly well. Should you consider VIA as an alternative to NVIDIA for your next AMD motherboard?

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System Test Setup:

CPU

AMD Athlon 64 CPUs as Noted

Motherboard

Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe

System Memory

2 x 512MB Corsair XMS PC3200LLPro

Hard Drive

Western Digital 74GB Raptor SATA/150

OS

Windows XP Pro SP1 with DirectX 9.0b

A Note on Testing: First, many of you will notice that there is a missing Pentium 4 CPU. Quite frankly, I did not see it as being important to the subject matter at hand here and we will cover that more in-depth in our conclusion statements. Secondly, we have included the new Athlon 64 X2 4800+ Dual-Core as well as an aging Athlon 3200+ operating at 2.4 and 2.2 GHz, respectively. We want to focus on these numbers as we think that many of you are wondering about your next upgrade. Again, we will tie this all together in our conclusion.

SiSoft Sandra Memory Bandwidth Benchmark

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Leading off with our synthetic memory bandwidth benchmark, the FX-57 comes in a bit lower than where we thought it should, but we are neither surprised nor worried by the score. Do remember that this memory controller on this processor is new and has been tweaked out to allow for another 1GB of high performance DDR-400 on the memory bus. Overall, the scores for the FX-57 look fine in terms of bandwidth as we think the CPU already has just about as much bandwidth as it can utilize.