AMD Athlon 64 FX-57: The Fastest Single Core
by Derek Wilson on June 27, 2005 11:47 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
The Test and Business/General Use Performance
The TestOur hardware configurations are similar to what we've used in previous comparisons.
AMD Athlon 64 Configuration
Socket-939 Athlon 64 CPUs
2 x 512MB OCZ PC3200 EL Dual Channel DIMMs 2-2-2-10
ASUS nForce4 SLI Motherboard
ATI Radeon X800 XT PCI Express
Intel Pentium 4 Configuration
LGA-775 Intel Pentium 4 and Extreme Edition CPUs
2 x 512MB Crucial DDR-II 533 Dual Channel DIMMs 3-3-3-12
Intel 925XE and 945G Motherboards
ATI Radeon X800 XT PCI Express
Business/General Use Performance
Business Winstone 2004
Business Winstone 2004 tests the following applications in various usage scenarios:
. Microsoft Access 2002
. Microsoft Excel 2002
. Microsoft FrontPage 2002
. Microsoft Outlook 2002
. Microsoft PowerPoint 2002
. Microsoft Project 2002
. Microsoft Word 2002
. Norton AntiVirus Professional Edition 2003
. WinZip 8.1
Office Productivity SYSMark 2004
SYSMark's Office Productivity suite consists of three tests, the first of which is the Communication test. The Communication test consists of the following:
"The user receives an email in Outlook 2002 that contains a collection of documents in a zip file. The user reviews his email and updates his calendar while VirusScan 7.0 scans the system. The corporate web site is viewed in Internet Explorer 6.0. Finally, Internet Explorer is used to look at samples of the web pages and documents created during the scenario."
The next test is Document Creation performance, which shows very little difference in drive performance between the contenders:
"The user edits the document using Word 2002. He transcribes an audio file into a document using Dragon NaturallySpeaking 6. Once the document has all the necessary pieces in place, the user changes it into a portable format for easy and secure distribution using Acrobat 5.0.5. The user creates a marketing presentation in PowerPoint 2002 and adds elements to a slide show template."
The final test in our Office Productivity suite is Data Analysis, which BAPCo describes as:
"The user opens a database using Access 2002 and runs some queries. A collection of documents are archived using WinZip 8.1. The queries' results are imported into a spreadsheet using Excel 2002 and are used to generate graphical charts."
Microsoft Office XP SP-2
Here we see in that the purest of office application tests, performance doesn't vary all too much.
Mozilla 1.4
Quite possibly the most frequently used application on any desktop is the one we pay the least amount of attention to when it comes to performance. While a bit older than the core that is now used in Firefox, performance in Mozilla is worth looking at as many users are switching from IE to a much more capable browser on the PC - Firefox.
ACD Systems ACDSee PowerPack 5.0
ACDSee is a popular image editing tool that is great for basic image editing options such as batch resizing, rotating, cropping and other such features that are too elementary to justify purchasing something as powerful as Photoshop for. There are no extremely complex filters here, just pure batch image processing.
Ahead Software Nero Express 6.0.0.3
While it was a major issue in the past, these days buffer underrun errors while burning a CD or DVD are few and far between thanks to high performance CPUs as well as vastly improved optical drives. When you take the optical drive out of the equation, how do these CPU's stack up with burning performance?
Winzip
Archiving performance ends up being fairly CPU bound as well as I/O limited.
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fishbits - Monday, June 27, 2005 - link
"Why are you still doing Mozilla 1.4 testing?"Because this is a CPU review, and they already have a slew of other CPUs tested with Mozilla 1.4? Did you think they retested it on every chip each time they got a new chip in? This keeps it apples-to-apples so we can see the relative performance of the new contender against ones who've already been benchmarked.
Or was there a specific score you needed to see for a specific version of Firefox to make or break your personal decision on whether to buy the FX-57 or not?
AnandTech: Please continue to isolate the performance of the item being reviewed as much as practical. Last thing we need is extra hardware and software variables thrown in, until you're ready to move the whole gaggle over to a new set of yardsticks.
ravedave - Monday, June 27, 2005 - link
Good straight forward article. Not much text though, expect your avg page view times to be tiny.What happened to all the suggestions people gave
when Anand asked for tests for this article in his blog? Comon it's a speedbump, do something interesting.At least provide some slow old processor in the rankings so we can all laugh and point.
Backslider - Monday, June 27, 2005 - link
With Half-Life 2 being the most CPU dependant game, I was suprised to see it missing from the benches.acejj26 - Monday, June 27, 2005 - link
Let me be the first to offer my services as an editor for articles here. I hate seeing articles here marred by poor grammar, spelling errors, and errors in the graphs.Kocur - Monday, June 27, 2005 - link
blckgrffn,Yes, you are right that DDR400 low latency will be better than DDR500 with very relaxed timings. However, you can buy now DDR memory with really nice timings at PC4000 speeds. See the memory tests at Anandtech and how much does FX53 gain from faster memory speeds at reasonable timings:). The same would hold for FX57 even to greater extent.
Moreover, I think that FX57 should have been tested on a really good, mature platform, for example, DFI LP. You cannot use some crapy reference mobo until the socket 939 dies.
Kocur.
Tallon - Monday, June 27, 2005 - link
My god, my eyes are fucking bleeding.Losing: http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=losing
Loosing: http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=loosing
Please learn the difference.
blckgrffn - Monday, June 27, 2005 - link
Dear lord! Do you know nothing of A64's and latency! DDR400 LL will stomp DDR500 @ relaxed timings, no problem! Further more, the baseline needs to stay the same, so they can't switch mobo and ram for every review.Next, mozilla 1.4 ~ Firefox. It is MOZILLA FIREFOX. Let's use our brain for that one, in that paragraph you said didn't make anysense, he laid it out for you.
I do have one gripe - how can everything be slower at UT2k4 than Doom3? Tell me that was 1600*1200 w/aa&af! Otherwise, that benchmark should have much higher scores, imho....
Other than that and that weird fluke where the 57 lost to the 55 and 4000+, thanks for the great article, Derek :)
Kocur - Monday, June 27, 2005 - link
johnsonx,Well, it actually might be correct. Remember that they are using for this test the first old reference motherboard they got with FX55 last year. Thus, the results for other AMD processors come from October last year (well, at least for FX55). At that time they might have used another hard disk.
Look also at the wierd results of P4 670 in some office tests with regard to other Intel processors. This is clearly disk/controller issue.
Kocur.
DrMrLordX - Monday, June 27, 2005 - link
Agreed #16, it's odd that the FX-55 and 4000+ win the Communication Sysmark 2004 bench. The FX-57 should have taken it easily.johnsonx - Monday, June 27, 2005 - link
It seems a bit odd that the FX-57 looses to the FX-55 and 4000+ in the third benchmark.... perhaps the labels are mixed up?