AMD Socket AM2, Athlon 64 FX-62

I ran a selection of benchmarks on the FX-62, although due to the limited time I had with the review kit there isn't a full range of 3D benchmarks. AMD supplied the Asus M2N32-SLI Deluxe motherboard and 1GB of 800MHz Corsair DDR 2 memory to test the FX-62 with. They weren't the new EPP modules from Corsair, so I couldn't test the new memory auto-overclocking feature. I also used a Connect3D X1800XT graphics card.

The overall SYSMark 2004SE score of 273 is very impressive - it's up nine points on the FX-60 on a similar platform. The improvements are much more visible in PCMark 05 where the new platform gains over 1,000 points. This is likely to be due to the fact that PCMark offers better multi-core awareness than SYSMark and since there are two faster cores - the CPU score and the overall score are affected to a higher degree. The graphics score isn't comparable, as different graphics cards where used, which would also have had an effect on the overall score. The CPU, memory and hard drive scores should be of comparable nature.

Besides a quick run of our standard 3D benchmarks - which don't really stress the CPU as much as they do the graphics cards - I thought some 3D rendering tests would be of interest. Using the latest beta of PovRay, the render test took 5m 28s using both cores and 10m 42s using just one core. It goes to show that there are some very real advantages to using a dual-core processor. Next up was Cinebench 9.5 which scored 411 CB-CPU points in the single-processor test and 759 CB-CPU points in the dual-processor test.

According to the results that SiSoft Sandra 2007 produced, there's plenty of memory bandwidth available to the CPU. However, even with the memory bandwidth reaching close to 8GB/s this doesn't seem representative to some of the performance gains in other benchmarks. But for anyone using very memory intensive applications this is good news and it is also a good sign for the future as faster processors might be able to take better advantage of the extra bandwidth.

Verdict

These are all some pretty impressive numbers, but bear in mind that we tested the AM2 platform with the FX-62 - other AM2 processors won't show any big improvements over their Socket 939 counterparts. It's a real shame that AMD didn't manage to squeeze some more performance out of the new CPUs, but this will hopefully come with time. For now, the AM2 processors aren't worth the investment if you have a Socket 939 system, unless you want the fastest CPU out there, the FX-62. However, this might not be the case for long if the Core 2 Duo lives up to Intel's hype. ®