WidowPC Gaming Computers - AMD FX60 is Dual Core Gaming Power.

The AMD Athlon 64 FX60 is a dual core gaming chip. Sadly, the first site to review FX60 based gaming computer didn't know how to review a dual core chip. This shows a lack of understanding of the fundamental differences required in the testing of a FX60 or any other dual core chip. An FX60 gaming computer is dual core and should be evaluated as such.

WidowPC now offers two FX60 based computers: the Widow FX SLI FX60 Gaming Computers and the Sting 917X2 FX60 Gaming Laptops.

I have no life but computers -- when I'm away from computers I tend to talk about computer games and gaming computers -- and I'm a geek (redundant? yes.). As such, I have a major quibble with the review posted by The Inquirer (www.inquirer.com)on December 6 about the FX60 titled "FX60 Slower than FX57".

Now that we've established that, I have to call into question the geek credentials of one Fuad Abazovic who posted said quibble-demanding bit. Let start with the basics.

"Slower" is a subjective term. Saying that the single core FX57 is faster than the dual core FX60 is the equivalent of saying "the one-legged man is faster than the two-legged man, because he wins the one-legged hop every time." The variables mentioned in Fuad's article are the FX60 versus the FX57 using "3DMark05". However, Fuad failed to mentioned what else was running in addition to the OS, what OS he was using, how much RAM he was using, what 3DMark05 test he ran... and made everything even more confusing when he mixed in the ATI Crossfire and NVIDIA SLI system comments as well as the inability to get the NVIDIA 7800 GTX 512MB GPUs to work in tandem.

So, he started by not qualifying his review headline with meaningful data (now ranked #1 on Google for "FX60"...confusing everyone who's trying to get educated on the new chip) and followed up by changing the subject (X1800 Crossfire issue), jumping back onto the subject and once again concluding by changing the subject (7800 GTX 512 issue).

I hope Fuad was drinking heavily at the time. As that would provide him an excuse for such a miss. If he wasn't drinking, then perhaps he should be. =)

To be fair, I haven't read very many articles anywhere that put the dual core chips in a fair light. The reason for that is most writers don't understand what light is fair for the dual core or even that that there is anything they should be doing anything different when evaulating dual core PU technology. If you are one of those writers, here beginneth thy education.

The dual core is made for multi-tasking. Big "duh", there. However, most benchmarking is still being done the old school way. Ie. to prepare for the benchmark the author shuts down everything else that is running and then proceeds to whip out a single threaded benchmarking tool (like 3DMark05 without enabling any of the multithreaded tests).

For those of you who are currently thinking "???", please do a Google for "3dmark05 dual core setting" and you'll find well rounded technical reviews of dual core chips versus single core chips in both single and multthreaded environments. A good example: http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/athlon64-x2_9.html

The above Xbit Labs article shows off how the dual core Athlon 64 4800+ is now able to kick Intel P4EE in the teeth on PCMark04 (first AMD CPU to do that on PCMark04) while leaving the remainder of the AMD and Intel single thread architectures in the dust in both PCMark04 and 3DMark05 Default, CPU Test 1 and Test 2. The Athlon 64 X2 4800+ scored 4.2 versus the FX55's 3.6 in Test 1 and a 6 versus the FX55's 4.8 in Test 2. We can only assume that the new dual core FX60 would do even better versus the single threaded FX57 than the older dual core 4800+.

The FX55 beat the X2 4800+ only in the single threaded tests: 3DMark2001 SE, Default and 3DMark05, Default with scores of 28329 to 27426 and 5741 to 5723 respectively.

That is an example of a well rounded, balanced comparison of two completely different CPUs. As a card holding geek, I believe it is my duty to educate Fuad and the rest of the "old school" writers out there so that they may one day use their powers for good and give us useful info on how these chips perform.

- Joshua

Joshua McClure
Director, Sales and Operations
WidowPC

Sign Up to Receive WidowPC News and Specials Monthly Newsletter

Comments

Posted by: Oujou at January 31, 2006 06:31 AM