AMD Athlon 64 FX-60

Multi-Tasking 1

Gaming while Anti-Virus is scanning:
FarCry v1.32 & AVG Anti-Virus 7.1; record frame rate in FarCry at 1280x1024 4xAA 8xAF while commencing a full system scan with AVG Anti-Virus.

In our first Multi-Tasking test, we noticed that the virus scanning was less efficient when running Far Cry in the foreground on all of the single cored Athlon 64's. It continued to run in the background, but we noticed the odd hitch in game play despite running a time demo.

We did not suffer this problem on the Hyper-Threaded Pentium 4 Extreme Edition 3.73GHz, which was pretty smooth throughout the entire time demo loop. Meanwhile, all of the dual core processors were creamy smooth, with FX-60 leading the pack. Significantly, the Athlon 64 X2 4400+ outperformed the Pentium Extreme Edition 955 in this test.

Multi-Tasking 2

Gaming while encoding a video stream:
FarCry v1.32 & AutoGK 2.20; record frame rate in FarCry at 1280x1024 4xAA 8xAF while encoding a video stream to Xvid using AutoGK.

In our second Multi-Tasking test, the Athlon 64 FX-60 was slightly faster than the Athlon 64 X2 4800+, with the Athlon 64 X2 4400+ following a little way behind. Meanwhile, the Pentium Extreme Edition 955 was slower than the Pentium D 950 and 940 models - we think this is related to the way that AutoGK utilises Hyper-Threading technology.

The single cored Athlon 64 processors stopped video encoding as soon as we loaded Far Cry up. We also experienced moderate hitching inside Far Cry, more so than when the virus scanner was running in the background. In short, don't try and play games while encoding video streams on a single cored Athlon 64 processor, you will not have a pleasurable gaming experience, no matter how fast your single cored CPU is. The situation gets worse with the lower clocked CPUs.