System Setup

System Setup

AMD Athlon 64 FX-74
AMD Athlon 64 FX-70

Intel Core 2 Extreme Edition X6800
Intel Core 2 Extreme Edition QX6700
Intel Core 2 Duo E6600

EVGA nForce 680i SLI motherboard
ASUS L1N64-SLI WS nForce 680a SLI motherboard

4GB Corsair TWIN2X2048-6400C3

NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX with ForceWare 97.02

Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2

DirectX 9.0c

Benchmarks

LAME MT MP3 Encoding (MS Compiler)
Windows Media Encoder 9
3DMark06
F.E.A.R. 1.08
Quake 4 1.2
Company of Heroes 1.3
Half-Life 2 Lost Coast
Cinebench 9.5

Notes

We really, really wanted to provide FX-70, FX-72, and FX-74 numbers, but for whatever reason whenever we downclocked our FX-74 CPU to FX-72 levels we encountered a number of BSODs and stability issues in Windows. Strangely enough, downclocking the FX-74 to FX-70 speeds worked okay, but the system just wouldn’t work very well at the 2.8GHz required for the FX-72. Of course, keep in mind that we’re testing with a preproduction board on a beta BIOS, hopefully ASUS and AMD will have the kinks worked out on final retail boards. We spent so much time troubleshooting the FX-72 problems however that we didn’t have time to test with other AMD CPUs such as the FX-62 and 5000+.

On the Intel side, we’ve included QX6700, X6800, and C2D 6600 numbers. We omitted C2D 6700 testing, as in many of our apps we’re testing with today it performs similarly to the QX6700. Let’s get started with the testing…