AMD Athlon 64 FX-60

Patterns Emerge:

First and foremost, ever since the launch of Socket 939, AMD seem to continually hit the nail on the head in terms of performance. It's getting increasingly hard to knock what AMD has done for the hardware enthusiast come hardcore gamer over the past 24 months or so. We really hope that this trend continues in the future.

Much like the Pentium Extreme Edition 955, this processor is expensive and it's going to cost you over £600 or $1000. It takes over the Athlon 64 FX-57 as AMD's flagship processor, but I guess the question you're all wanting me to answer is whether it is worthy of that title? The FX-57 was a damn fast single core processor and there's no doubt about that; however, the Athlon 64 X2 4800+ is also a damn fast processor in single core applications too. Until today, it was the fastest all-round processor available to buy.

Back in our initial look at the Athlon 64 X2 4800+, I said the following:

"Dual core processing is the future, but very few of us have a use for it now. However, there are undoubtedly the gang of early adopters who may well benefit from a dual core processor. Hopefully after reading this, you should be able to decide whether dual core is for you. Remember to be realistic, the Athlon 64 X2 is an expensive alternative to the Athlon 64 FX-55 and if you are sensible with your computing habits, you will not find the Athlon 64 FX-55 or 4000+, for that matter, being overstretched by your needs.

"There will come a time where a single cored processor will not be enough though, but we don't envisage that happening any time in the immediate future."

The time has come...

Eight months on, and that time is getting closer and closer to us. In fact, I feel that the time is close enough that you should just assume it has arrived. Anyone who is building a system for the future would be foolish not to consider getting a dual core processor at the heart of their system. It makes little sense to look at a single core processor now.

There are already four games out on the market that are said to take advantage of dual core processors, despite both Call of Duty 2 and F.E.A.R. not quite living up to the same expectations as Quake 4. Both ATI and NVIDIA have released drivers with performance enhancements for dual core processors, and game developers are going to be releasing more and more multi-threaded games.

This is partly thanks to to the release of Xbox 360 and the pending release of PlayStation 3 - both of these bleeding edge gaming machines feature multi-core processors, so many, if not all future console ports will have some element of multi-core support and performance enhancement inbuilt. It's quite simple: multi-core processors are, without doubt the future of gaming. It's only a matter of time before top game developers like Valve Software and Epic Games start to implement dual core performance enhancements into their current and next generation engines.

There are also many multi-threaded applications, like DVD Shrink and AutoGK that can really show great improvements as a result of having the second core. Lets not forget the general feel of using a dual core processor too - I've had an Athlon 64 X2 3800+ in my main system for over two months now and I can't see myself going back to a single core processor ever again.

Final Thoughts...

The Athlon 64 FX-60 may not be the most attractive processor, based on its price, but it's good to see that the two slower Athlon 64 X2's with 1MB L2 cache per core keep up quite well with it. At £350, the Athlon 64 X2 4400+ is an attractive buy compared to the Athlon 64 X2 4800+, which currently retails at £535. We suspect that this will come down in due course, but we can't see it dropping down to a price that makes it even more attractive than the X2 4400+.

Lets not forget the Athlon 64 X2 3800+ either. It offers tremendous value for someone looking to get into the dual core market on a budget. We've not heard final pricing on the Pentium D 900-series just yet, but we expect the lower end processors to be reasonably competitive with the X2 3800+.

With that said, with the exception of one multi-tasking scenario, the Athlon 64 FX-60 is the fastest all-round processor on the planet. The Pentium Extreme Edition 955 may be attractive to someone who often finds themselves wanting to do more than two things at the same time, but that market is limited to a few die hard power users. However, it's worth noting that there are rare occasions where I find myself running out of processor power with my current Athlon 64 X2.