Athlon 64 FX-62 Dual-Core Socket AM2 Review

Memory Bandwidth: Sandra Lite 2007

We decided to include a memory bandwidth benchmark on this review, since depending on the CPU model the memory bus won’t be running at full speed, as we explained on the first page of this review. As Athlon 64 FX-62 has its memory bus truly running at 800 MHz (400 MHz x 2) and Athlon 64 X2 5000+ has its memory bus running at 742 MHz (371 MHz x 2), we were very curious to compare the memory bandwidth achieved by these two CPUs. On the graph below we also include the maximum theoretical performance for DDR2-800 memories running at single channel (6,400 MB/s) and at dual channel (12,800 MB/s). Since our memories were running at dual channel, in theory we had to achieve something near 12,800 MB/s. Let’s take a look.

Athlon 64 FX-62 achieved a memory transfer rate 10.20% greater than the one achieved by Athlon 64 X2 5000+ and 36.27% greater than the DDR2-800 standard transfer rate. However, it was able to use only 68.13% of the available bandwidth, as we were running it at dual channel mode. It seems that AMD has work to be done on the embedded memory controller from AM2 CPUs.