Who's bright idea was it to implement netburst architecture in the first place?

Excellent review as always. I liked the "compare and contrast" moment halfway through.

I hoped to see the P4EE put up more of a fight. As it was, half the time it was playing with the FX-57, if anything.

But I'd also like to know exactly what Presler and Cedar Mill actually bring to the party? Presler consumes not much less power than Prescot, performs not much better, but is a bit smaller.

Er... great. Bring on the Core. Now. Please?
-Mole

I remember when the Pentium Pro (server version of the original pentium) went for $1000 and seemed to be worth it, I remind myself of this everytime my mind starts to think of buying one of the FX series chips... although it sure is tempting...

BTW is the FX 60 unlocked multiplier wise? I remember hearing that all of the FX series were unlocked?

Yesterday I read that Fx-60 is primarily engineered to operate in Windows. Scores for Windows Office & Windows Media where most impressive of all scores, as far as % improvement over Fx-57. While Fx-60 is only 10% faster than X2 4800+, it has 233 million tranistors. Obviously Intel is going to 333mhz/sec core clock, Already 266 mhz/sec clock core are coming out, theres leading edge somewhere with Intel, it just isn't gaming, per se'. Someday AMD will try 65 nm, faster, core & memory, it seems AMD holds back as long as possible to put extra touch into design that gives AMD quite advantage in quality of workmanship.Narrowing processors potenial to max out with windows is another reason to game AMD.Hey AMD I think dual core needs more tranistors.Signed:PHYSICIAN THOMAS STEWART VON DRASHEK M.D.

one should consider...
the new intel CPU is running 800MHz faster, has more cache...
and yet its power consuption compared to the FX60 is impressive.

imagine the FX60s power consumption running at 3.4GH lol

Great review Scott...thanks for the painful reminder how far behind the times I am with my own systems. *sighs*

So I have some other things on my plate first, but the plan is to add a range of CPUs to these results and publish additional articles about the new range of Pentium D 900s, Opteron 100 series, lower end X2s, and hopefully Yonah (though at 32 bits). We had to stick to the high-end stuff this time around, but once the template has been established, more will come. It is not my intention to stick to only $999 processors, and this newly modified benchmark suite deserves to be used with more affordable CPUs, too. Just couldn't do it all at once.

Kudos for the fraps testing in FEAR and BF2.

Frame drops into the 20's....at 10x7 in FEAR....ouch.

i'd say the performance is... disappointing compared to the 4800+ and FX-57, but no surprise in beating out Intel. DDR1 is pretty much the only problem, possibly holding the processor back- i think the first FX chips that run on DDR2 will be the ones to wait for.

I dont get how a 6800 card scores 9000+ in 3dmark05....

...must be a typo it probably was the GTX 512.

Great Article.

What strikes me most from the article is not just the impressive number of times the AMD processor achieve the best scores, but that they can do it with such a megahertz handicap! Even when the XE is overclocked to 4.266666666666 GHz, the AMD chip is still faster.

Intel better hope Conroe is competetive or else I dunno what's gonna happen. I also heard on CNBC this morning that Dell will begin selling systems with AMD chips starting Q2 of this year. I hope they can meet the demand.

Pretty impressive article..Great job as usual. Long Live AMD:) Im gonna go look and see how Tom's covers it..hehe

Conroe seems to be pushed for Q2/06. And AMD AM2 sockets CPUs are around the corner aswell. Any new AMD64 DDR1 or P4 CPUs are just deadborn children, specially 1000$ CPUs.

So for everyone, squeeze you butt together and wait the last few months. Nomatter if you wanna buy AMD or Intel.

EDIT: Forgot to add. This is the LAST 939 speedbump. They continue to make 939 CPUs, just not any faster versions.

Not a good time to buy a high-end gaming system.

1) AMD: Socket AM2 with DDR2 coming out within 6 months
2) Intel: Merom/Conroe coming out within 6 months

Regardless, getting an Opteron 165 or 170 and overclocking it seems to be a far cheaper option, and generally as good, if not better, than buying an FX60 (even if you overclock it).

So these releases of performance processors will cater to non-informed gamers and people with little sense. Sadly that's a lot!

Anyway, at least Intel's processor isn't a total embarrassment these days. Outperformed, yes. Power hungry, yes. But both of these will be dealt with by Conroe. AMD's issue of memory bandwidth will be dealt with by AM2, presumably with the new F Stepping to reduce power further, enable a 2.8GHz FX dual core on 90nm, and possibly a 3GHz single core, if AMD care about the performance single-core market any longer...

Both Sisoft Sandra and 3Dmarks synthetic benchmarks gave Intel wins. And it only won in 1 real world test which was sphinx. Shows how useless they can be, especially 3Dmark. The Gaming benchmark, if you believe those numbers Intel should win in at least half of the gaming benchmarks. It got creamed instead.

I think it's about time 3Dmark got left out to dry.

Gav

Excellent review.

Looks like I'll be doing my video card soon, and then the whole shooting match can go to my wife in 2007.

Bring on AM2!

Looks like there is an error in the Lame/CBR/MS results, the X2 4800+ got exactly the same score as the 955XE which doesn't make sense (it should be just a tad slower than the FX-60 obviously).

It's nice to know that nutburst marchitecture is on its way out. You really can't polish a turd as these reviews have proven time and again.

Isn't there 1066MHz DDR2 yet? I thought it's usually better to have the RAM at the same speed as the FSB.

I don't see how it's disappointing. I mean it's only clocked 200 Mhz higher than a 4800+ Performance is about what I was expecting. Rather look at how well it does against the 200 Mhz faster FX57 just due to software optimizations.

Nice review though ! Well done.