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| AMD ATHLON 64 FX-53 |
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Review: Stuart
"Veridian3"
Davidson
The Athlon64 FX-51 has been AMD’s flagship CPU for the better part of 6 months. Considering the frequency at which the Thoroughbred and Barton cores were released this is a long time between CPU releases for AMD. If we are honest, they haven’t had much reason to crank up the clock rate before now. Intel have spent the last months playing with their Pentium 4 core to release the powerful but overpriced P4 Extreme Edition and the late, underperforming and hot running Prescott P4. The FX-53 is AMD’s attempt to extend their performance lead over Intel in some applications and in others to even things up. The FX-53 is architecturally identical to the FX-51 in all but the clock rate…where the FX-51 is rated at 2.2ghz the FX-53 is rated at 2.4ghz. Today we shall be taking a look at how this 200mhz increase improves on the performance of the FX-51 on 2 systems. The first system consists of components in the average users desktop system such as a 5900XT, IDE100 hard drive and the second system contains more high end components such as a 5950Ultra and Western Digital Raptors in a Raid configuration. We’ll also spend some time looking at the overclocking potential of the FX-53. Tech Specs and Test systems: Here is a quick overview of the specifications for the Athlon64 FX-53: L1 Cache Size: 64KB data + 64KB instruction
= 128KB As you can see from the above listing and graphics below the FX-53 is a socket 940 processor based on a .13 micron process. Though future FX’s will move to Socket 939 the industry is not quite ready for that switch yet and AMD have wisely chosen not to change. Cache remains the same as the previous FX model with 64bytes of data cache and 64bytes of instruction cache making up the 128bytes of L1 cache. The L2 cache stays at 1mb. On the memory front
the FX officially supports DDR266/333 and DDR400 registered/ECC memory.
As we mentioned in the introduction to this review we shall be testing 2 Athlon64 FX-53 systems, here are the specifications for both: Mainstream System: High-End System: Software:
The test system was built from scratch, a format of the hard drive was performed (NTFS) and then Windows XP was installed. Following the completion of the install the N-force drivers were installed. The only updates applied were SP1a and Direct X 9.0b. Following a reboot the Detonator 53.03 drivers were installed. Next the benchmarking tools were installed and finally the hard drive was de-fragmented. For all tests the Nvidia drivers were set to best image quality. Good Benchmarking Practice:
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