Memory performance (continued)
Not only are our 3D graphs indulgent, but they're useful, too. I've arranged them manually in a very rough order from worst to best, for what it's worth. I've also colored the data series according to how they correspond to different parts of the memory subsystem. Yellow is L1 cache, light orange is L2 cache, and orange is main memory. The red series on the Extreme Edition graph represents L3 cache. Of course, caches sometimes overlap, so the colors are just an interesting visual guide.

All in all, memory access latency is definitely one of the FX-53's strong suits. The Pentium 4 processors, by contrast, take nearly twice as long to access main memory in some cases, although the P4 Extreme Edition does mitigate this effect somewhat with its L3 cache.