APPARENTLY, the Athlon 64 FX-51 processor wasn't enough. This $733 former Opteron, converted into a desktop chip just to put the smack down on Intel, was no slouch. In fact, it abused our benchmarks throughout its tenure, making its sky-high price seem almost reasonable. Now, however, a new model, the Athlon 64 FX-53, is replacing the FX-51 wholesale.

To gauge the FX-53's success in its quest for the Overall Performance Lead in the x86 world, we've lined up sixteen of its competitors and tested it against 'em all. Our contestants range from the exotic (the P4 Extreme Edition 3.4GHz) to the novel (the Pentium 4 Prescott) to the massively overclocked (the Athlon XP-M 2500+ dialed up to 2.4GHz.) To make things even more interesting, we'll be exploring how the various AMD and Intel processors assembled here scale with clock speed and model number increases.

I promise, if you like performance graphs like I do, this review will satisfy your cravings. Read on to see what I mean.