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AMD Athlon 64 FX-60: A Dual-Core farewell to Socket-939

 by Anand Lal Shimpi on January 9, 2006 11:59 PM EST
94 Comments | Add A Comment
94 Comments
Gaming Performance using Battlefield 2, Call of Duty 2 and Quake 4

Gaming performance is pretty respectable for the Pentium EE 955, with the chip being quite competitive with AMD's Athlon 64 X2 4800+.

The most interesting thing we found is that even with a high end GPU like the Radeon X1800 XT, a number of games are still quite GPU limited even at 1024x768, which is why you don't see F.E.A.R. and Splinter Cell: CT here. Even some of the games that we did required us to turn down some of the detail settings to start to stress the CPUs.

The pendulum often swings between games being CPU and GPU limited, and it seems that with the latest generation of games, we are definitely more GPU limited.

Battlefield 2

Battlefield 2 performance of the FX-60 is quite strong; however, the single core FX-57 is still able to hold a slight advantage over the newcomer. The performance difference isn't noticeable, but it is worth pointing out.

We should also mention that we had to re-run our AMD numbers in this test since the last review as we were seeing sub-par AMD performance. A clean install and re-run of the numbers yielded the results that you see today; the Intel numbers didn't change.

Call of Duty 2

Once again, Call of Duty 2 shows that the FX-60 is nipping at the heels of the FX-57, but not exactly outperforming it. That being said, our CoD2 test appears to be quite GPU bound even at 1024 x 768 with a X1800 XT, so the difference in performance here is minor at best.

We did run with SMP support disabled, as we found in our last article that the game gave us higher frame rates without it enabled.

Quake 4

For Quake 4, we turned to the latest 1.05 beta SMP patch, with SMP enabled, to give us these results. When more multithreaded games start shipping, you should see a performance breakdown similar to this, with the single core FX-57 not able to keep up with the new king of the hill: the FX-60.

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  • latrosicarius - Tuesday, January 10, 2006 - link

    Would have been funny too :-P

  • Furen - Tuesday, January 10, 2006 - link

    The key word is "faster"... AMD will continue producing socket 939 CPUs for a while yet, we just wont get any speed bumps, kind of like they did with socket 754. I thought we'd get an extra X2 on socket 939 though...

  • Furen - Tuesday, January 10, 2006 - link

    Is the FX-55 being retired? Or is it just getting a price drop?

  • Anand Lal Shimpi - Tuesday, January 10, 2006 - link

    Retired, only the FX-57 and 60 will remain on the market.

    Take care,
    Anand

  • Rand - Tuesday, January 10, 2006 - link

    I wish the gaming tests had been done at 640x480 so as to attempt to minimize the graphics cards influence on the results.

  • Anand Lal Shimpi - Tuesday, January 10, 2006 - link

    Normally I'm not in favor of running things at that low of a resolution, especially with this pricey of a graphics card, but I am looking at some other options for getting more useful gaming results. Who knows, it may not be too long before we have something in house that's a little less GPU bound to pair up with these ultra-fast CPUs :)

    I am also considering doing a high end CPU + SLI/Crossfire article to look at exactly what the CPU/GPU balance of today's games happens to be.

    But to keep this post short - request heard and understood :)

    Take care,
    Anand

  • bob661 - Tuesday, January 10, 2006 - link

    quote:
    Who knows, it may not be too long before we have something in house that's a little less GPU bound to pair up with these ultra-fast CPUs :)

    Aaawwwww sooky sooky!! Come on, give us a little more please!!!!

  • Questar - Tuesday, January 10, 2006 - link

    How about using the D3D Null driver?

  • Tytanium - Tuesday, January 10, 2006 - link

    I would have liked to have seen it running at 14x200 so it had the same clock as an FX-57 though :/, for comparison's sake (dual core and all that)

  • Anand Lal Shimpi - Tuesday, January 10, 2006 - link

    We've done dual core vs. single core articles in the past that would be able to give you the answers you're looking for. While they weren't at 2.6GHz, their results are still applicable today.

    Take care,
    Anand
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