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This morning AMD unveils the new Athlon64 FX-55 and Athlon64 4000+, unfortunately our review samples have disappeared into the ether for the time being however whilst we wait for them to arrive we have a few results to share with you regarding the performance of the FX-55, and how it should perform compared to the FX-53. The FX-55 is essentially the same chip as the FX-53, the only difference being the move from 2.4ghz to 2.6ghz (through a multiplier change from 12x to 13x). The core is still based on the 0.13 process, 0.9 is for a future chip as is dual core. Also as the FX-55 and FX-53 are based on the same design all of the features of the A64 remain such as the HT speed sitting at 1000mhz and the additional virus protection that the chip provides (in conjunction with XP SP2) is also still enabled. Support for the FX-55 should happen out of the box on most socket 939 motherboards, our MSI 6702 motherboard for example doesn’t even need a bios update to the original retail bios to support the new chip, just plug n play. This is also the case for other boards such as the Gigabyte GA-K8NSNXP-939. Before we look at the performance compared
to the FX-53 its worth noting that AMD have provided us with some
test results which show the FX-55 will perform roughly 8% faster than
the A64 4000+ and 15% faster than a P4 3.4ghz EE overall (Office use/gaming
and Digital Media). Looking at gaming specifically, in a selection
of games released in the past couple of years the performance difference
between the 4000+ and FX-55 is around 7%. As mentioned in our introduction our FX-55/A64 4000+ samples have gone walkabout so we’ve been resourceful and changed the multiplier on our FX-53 to give you an idea of how the FX-55 should perform when compared to a standard clocked FX-53. The benchmarks included below also don’t feature the full suite of CPU tests we would normally provide such as our Photoshop bench and DVD encoding test. These will be held back until the full article on the new chips. Test System: Athlon64 FX-53 @ 2.6ghz (13x200mhz) MSI K8TNeo2-FIR (Via based) Motherboard
with Bios 3.0 Windows XP SP2 + all critical updates Sisoft Sandra 2004 The test system was built from scratch, a format of the hard drive was performed (NTFS) and then Windows XP was installed (inc Sp2). Following the completion of the install the Hyperion drivers were installed. Then the Windows Update Critical Updates were installed. Following a reboot the Catalyst drivers were installed. Next the benchmarking tools were installed and finally the hard drive was de-fragmented. For all tests the Catalyst drivers were set to best image quality. Good Benchmarking Practice:
From our initial testing there isn’t really anything out of the ordinary to see, the FX-55 is a reasonable margin ahead of the FX-53 in all tests and if you’re a performance user you certainly will see an increase in your everyday performance regardless of your PC usage. There is of course a lot more to look into such as the performance when encoding or heavy graphics work in Photoshop and these, along with overclocking and the A64 4000+ will be looked at in our full review within the next week or so.
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