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AMD Athlon 64 FX-51 |
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Performance Continued, Overclocking, Conclusions
For more real-world gaming performance we have Quake III, running our in-house OCAU Slayer demo. This is a much more intensive demo than the ones provided with the game. We ran the demo in High-Quality mode, with the resolution changed to 1024x768, Geometric Detail on High and the Texture Detail slider at maximum.
Pity the once-mighty AthlonXP, being soundly beaten here. The Athlon 64 FX and P4 perform identically.
Finally, FutureMark (or, as they were known when they released it, MadOnion) 3DMark2001SE. Their more recent 3DMark03 product is more of a video card benchmark, while the 2001SE utility relies more on CPU and memory performance so is more suited to this review. We used Build 330, the most recent update to the 2001SE version.
A stock result of just under 20k 3DMarks for the Athlon 64 FX is impressive indeed, beating both the P4 and the AthlonXP easily.
Performance Summary
It's hard to draw a clear-cut conclusion about performance, even from this diverse set of benchmarks. The results really are quite varied. It seems that the Athlon 64 FX fares badly in synthetic benchmarks but does well in real-world tasks. However, the poor performance in POV-Ray and the very good performance in 3DMark are against this trend. We can say with some disappointment that the Athlon 64 FX doesn't represent a whole new era of performance, soundly thrashing all comers. However, for a debut product at a relatively low MHz, the results are quite impressive. If this is the baseline performance for this new platform then the future is looking very bright, with the P4 and AthlonXP already clearly hitting their limits and resorting to tactics like larger caches and higher FSB speed rather than continuing to raise the core speed by significant amounts. Intel's announcement of their P4 "Extreme Edition" with a large L3 cache a few days before the Athlon 64 launch is no coincidence, methinks. However, we can assume that in the future, from the current almost-level position, the AMD64 platform will continue to power away from the older P4 and AthlonXP platforms. Of course, Intel has some surprises waiting in the wings but they remain some way off yet.
We should stress again that we are only testing the 32-bit performance of this CPU today. There's no meaningful way for us to quantify the 64-bit performance for enthusiasts and gamers at this time because there is no software they would be using to take advantage of it.
Overclocking:
Again our time was limited, but I was able to do a little overclocking with this CPU. I think the CoolerMaster cooler was not quite up to the job, to be honest, as I found the system more stable when using a Sunon 80mm fan in place of the supplied one. As mentioned earlier, the retail CPUs you will see in on the shelf will be boxed with a higher-rated heatsink and fan than the one we're using today. With the Sunon fan installed and bearing in mind this CPU is one of only very few in the country and there is a queue of other people wanting to get their hands on it, I was only willing to take the CPU to 1.65v, .1v above default. There is no capacity for multiplier adjustment on this motherboard, but in this configuration we were able to get the CPU to run 3DMark2001SE at 215MHz FSB or 2365MHz core speed, producing a score of 20467 3DMark2001SE marks. This is a fairly typical result for a debut CPU and we can expect the overclocking headroom to expand as the yield goes up over time.
 
Pricing and Conclusions:
It has to be said, this is certainly an interesting product from AMD. The performance is very good but not spectacularly better than current offerings. The requirement to use registered memory is unfortunate, especially if they are aiming at the gaming/enthusiast market, who have probably already invested in some DDR400 or higher-spec non-registered memory which they won't be able to use with their new Athlon 64 FX system. When you factor in the pricing, with Plus Corporation listing the FX-51 as reviewed here at over AUD$1400 for the CPU alone, with the motherboard not far from $500 and you then have to purchase some registered memory, I think most gamers and enthusiasts will stay away for the moment. It seems more of a technology demonstrator than something they expect to ship in large quantities. Admittedly, some members of the market are used to paying AUD$1000 for the latest video card and for those for whom cutting-edge performance at any cost is a way of life this CPU is definitely worth considering. It seems more likely that people will go for the Athlon 64, which is only around half the price of the FX chip and does not require registered memory. As for how that one performs, well, we'll have to wait and see.
Thanks again to Plus Corporation for their help with this review.
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