Pricing, Platforms, and Overclocking

Pricing

It used to be that the Athlon 64 FX was not only faster than Intel’s competing Extreme Edition, but less expensive as well. Slowly, the AMD flagship has risen in price to reflect its compelling level of performance. And while AMD continues to sell its Athlon 64 FX-55 at $827, the FX-57 sets a new pricing record at $1,031.

In comparison, a dual-core Athlon 64 X2 4800+ sells for $1,001, while the 3.73GHz Extreme Edition lists for $999. No longer may AMD lay claim to the value title, although it seems to have little trouble regularly redefining what it means to enable higher levels of performance.

AMD claims the FX-57 will be available immediately, with systems shipping in North America, Europe, and Asia.

Platform Considerations

Nothing changes with regard to platform compatibility. The 2.8 GHz Athlon 64 FX-57 runs in the same Socket 939 motherboards as its predecessor, fits within the same thermal envelope and consequentially uses the same heatsinks as well. A BIOS update will likely be require in order to properly identify the CPU, but that’s pretty much standard fare by now.

Overclocking

AMD rolled out strained silicon with its 130nm Athlon 64 FX-55 in order to enable speeds as high as 2.6 GHz. Further refinements and a move to 90nm have yielded the 2.8 GHz we see here today. It doesn’t seem that the process currently has a whole lot of extra headroom quite yet, though. While many others report success with overclocks in the 3 GHz range, our FX-57 sample remained stable at up to 2.9GHz using a 14.5x multiplier. Of course, 3 GHz ran with both a 15x ratio and higher bus speeds; however, Windows Media Encoder would regularly crash. Performance still increased at 2.9 GHz, as you’ll see in the benchmark charts, though.

Just for kicks we decided to do a little informal dual-core overclocking as well. Lo and behold, the X2 4800+, with a bit of coaxing, also hit 2.8 GHz. It took a 233 MHz bus, 12x multiplier, 4x HyperTransport ratio and 1.5V, but the configuration actually ran stably.