The time when Intel and AMD had a competition going on for the fastest CPU, we liked the fact about Intel that even if it was in lead, it would continue releasing new CPUs and widen the game between itself and AMD. However, AMD usually likes to stay low if their product is the fastest one and maybe it makes more sense for them as they抮e a much smaller company than Intel and need to maximize profits out of each product.
Thus we are presently surprised with AMD's release of the FX-57 today, which is faster than their current leading FX-55 CPU which, in turn, is arguably the fastest single core desktop CPU in quite a few areas of computing. Lets take a look at the CPU-Z screenshot of this processor which will tell you all that you need to know.
As you can see, the FX-57 is based on the new 90nm based San Diego Core that adds SSE3 instructions to AMD CPUs. The speed of this CPU is 2800MHz which is reached by using a multiplier of 14X with a 200MHz HTT. As with all FX series CPUs, the L2 cache is 1MB in size. Lets see how this CPU performs but lets take a look at the testbed before we dive into the benchmarks.
| Motherboard: | DFI nForce4 SLI |
| Memory: | 2 x 512MB Corsair DDR400 Memory Module |
| VGA Card: | nVidia GeForce 6800GT |
| Optical/Hard Drives: | ASUS 52X CDRW, Western Digital 10,000RPM 36GB Raptor Serial-ATA |
| Monitor: | Relisys 19" Monitor |
| Operating System: | Windows XP Professional SP2 |
| Motherboard Drivers: | nVidia nForce 6.31 (beta) |
| VGA Drivers: | nVidia Forceware 71.84 |
Our Corsair memory works very well at DDR400 speeds with SPD values of 2.0-2-2-5 which is what was used to benchmark all the CPUs that use DDR in this roundup. For comparison, we've chosen the Athlon64 3500+, 4000+, FX-55 and X2 4800+ from the AMD camp while Intel's selection of CPUs includes the 3.4GHz, the 3.46GHz EE and the 3.73GHz. The following applications were used to test these boards.
| CPI/Memory/HD: | PC Mark '04 CPU, Memory, Graphics and Hard Drive. Sandra 05 Memory Benchmarks |
| Graphics Benchmarks: | 3D Mark 2001SE, 3D MArk 2003, 3D Mark 2005 and Aquamark3- Default Settings. |
| Full Games: | Doom3, UT2004, Far Cry, Counter Strike: Source at 1024x768 resolution |
| Audio/Video Encoding: | WorldBench: Jukebox, AutoGK with Pirates of Carribian DVD, WB: 3D Studio Max |
| General Applications: | WorldBench: Adobe Photoshop, Ahead Nero, Microsoft Office, Mozilla and Winzip |
| 3D Workstation: | Cinibench 2003, WB: 3D Studio Max (OpenGL and Direct-X) |
If you would like for us to add any additional benchmarking software, please email us at suggestions@
AMD's Athlon 64 FX-57 Launched (2005-06-28)