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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Application Benchmarks

WorldBench 2005

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WB2005 has become a staple here at HardOCP for testing as we think it does a very solid job at testing many applications and delivering a metric. You can look at our FX-57 and see that it has tied our X2 4800+ in returning the highest ever WB2005 benchmark score that we have ever seen. That said, would you ever really notice this in a real work application? That is debatable, but a CPU with higher clock speed is always welcome if you are doing content creation, video editing, and/or rendering.

If we compare our X2 4800+ scores with our FX-57 scores, you will see that they were stronger in different parts of the test. The X2 4800+ was much stronger in multitasking tests due to its dual cores, while the FX-57 pulled ahead in single usage tests due to its higher clock speed. We will discuss this finding more in the conclusion.

dBpowerAMP Music Converter

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This is a very simple single threaded real world timed application where we convert a very long Frank Zappa tune into a MP3 file. Our 2.8GHz FX-57 mops the floor with everything else in sight. Keep in mind, however, that we could have done two file conversions simultaneously with the X2 4800+ in about the same amount of time as it took us to convert one file on the X2 in our single benchmark shown above.

DVD2AVI DivX encoder w/ codec 5.1.1

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Again, we see the sheer clock speed of the FX-57 dominate in this test. Do however keep in mind that this is a single threaded test. Had we used a multithreaded application such as Windows Movie Maker or Adobe Premier Elements, we would have been able to encode our video much faster in the final phase on the dual core X2 4800+.