Athlon 64 FX-57 Review

Introduction

Athlon 64 FX-57 is the latest and fastest single-core CPU from AMD. In this review we will compare its performance with the previous model of Athlon 64 FX, FX-55, with Athlon 64 4000+, which is the fastest single-core CPU on Athlon 64 line, with other CPUs from AMD and also with some CPUs from Intel, like Pentium 4 3.2 GHz, Pentium 4 3.4 GHz, Pentium 4 Extreme Edition 3.2 GHz and Pentium 4 Extreme Edition 3.4 GHz. The only model we didn’t have available for comparison was the 3.6 GHz Pentium 4. Also, we won’t compare the new Athlon 64 FX-57 with dual-core CPUs, we will keep that for the Athlon 64 X2 and Pentium D reviews, as soon as AMD and Intel send us samples for reviewing.

Figure 1: Athlon 64 FX-57 we reviewed.

Athlon 64 FX-57 uses the socket 939 pinout, the same platform used by Athlon 64 FX-55, Athlon 64 FX-53 and newer Athlon 64 CPUs like Athlon 64 4000+ and Athlon 64 3800+. The main feature of this platform is the Dual DDR Channel support, which doubles the transfer rate of RAM memory compared to socket 754 Athlon 64 CPUs (6.400 MB/s vs. 3.200 MB/s if DDR400 is used).

Figure 2: Athlon 64 FX-57, bottom view. It uses socket 939.

The new Athlon 64 FX-57 runs at 2.8 GHz and has a 1 MB L2 memory cache. The previous model, Athlon 64 FX-55, runs at 2.6 GHz. The fastest Athlon 64, Athlon 64 4000+, runs at 2.4 GHz, the same clock rate as Athlon 64 FX-53. Actually Athlon 64 FX-53 and Athlon 64 4000+ are the same CPU.

The difference between Athlon 64 FX and Athlon 64 is the fact that Athlon 64 FX series doesn’t have its clock multiplier locked, allowing more overclocking possibilities. The complete specs of the Athlon 64 FX-57 we reviewed you can check in Figure 3. By the way, our ABIT AV8 motherboard does by default a small overclocking (HTT is set as 204 MHz). We’ve corrected this to 200 MHz in all CPUs we installed in order to have honest results in our benchmarking.

Figure 3: Specs of the Athlon 64 FX-57 we reviewed.

In the table below you can see the specs of all Athlon 64 FX CPUs released so far.

CPU	Internal Clock	L1 Cache	L2 Cache	Socket	Hyper Transport	DDR Dual Channel
Athlon 64 FX-51	2.2 GHz	128 KB	1 MB	940	800 MHz	Yes, Registered
Athlon 64 FX-53	2.4 GHz	128 KB	1 MB	940	800 MHz	Yes, Registered
Athlon 64 FX-53	2.4 GHz	128 KB	1 MB	939	1 GHz	Yes
Athlon 64 FX-55	2.6 GHz	128 KB	1 MB	939	1 GHz	Yes
Athlon 64 FX-57	2.8 GHz	128 KB	1 MB	939	1 GHz	Yes

The very first Athlon 64 FX processor lauched, FX-51, used the socket 940 pinout. This platform is the same used by the Opteron CPU, which is targeted to the server market. The problem with this platform is that it requires registered memories, which are more expensive and a little bit slower than conventional memories. From FX-53 model on Athlon 64 FX uses the socket 939 platform, which is the same platform used by newer Athlon 64 CPUs.

Talking a little bit about pricing, on https://www.pricewatch.com you can find the Athlon 64 FX-57 at USD 1138, on average. Athlon 64 FX-55 is quoted at USD 915, on average, while Athlon 64 4000+ is quoted at USD 586, also on average.