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AMD Athlon X2 6000+ Review |
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No FX for You! |
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by Josh Walrath |
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System Setup I do not have any Core 2 Duo chips in the test lab so I was left with the older X2 5000+ to compare with. AMD has not changed the overall design, so there are no performance tweaks included in the 6000+ over its older brother. Instead I am focusing on what kind of performance scaling and improvements we see with an X2 running 400 MHz faster with double the L2 cache. Asus M2N32-SLI Deluxe Motherboard Super Talent 2 GB PC6400 @ 4:4:3:8 timings GeForce 7950 GX2 Graphics Card Seagate 7200.10 Barracuda 320 GB Toshiba DVD-ROM Windows XP Professional 64 I tested this solution with both the ThermalTake PurePower 600 and PC Power and Cooling 510 SLI power supplies. Both were able to handle the power requirements of this setup without issue. I also used the AMD provided Copper/Aluminum stock cooler for this review. It kept the CPU well cooled with a tolerable level of noise. The memory actually runs at 376.7 MHz (753 MHz effective) on the X2 6000+, so it is slower than the DDR-2 800 speeds that the 2.4 GHz and 2.8 GHz Athlon 64s for AM2 run at. Results I tried to spread the benchmarks around a bit to get a good idea of this processor’s performance in different situations compared to the X2 5000+. Again, due to my lack of any Intel Core 2 Duo chip, I am unable to provide comparative benchmarks for those products. 3D Mark 2005 This older benchmark still is a bit more CPU bound these days than graphics, as such it shows some nice differences in a variety of applications and workloads.
This benchmark does not push the 7950 GX2 at default resolutions, so we see a nice scaling in the game tests with the faster CPU. We see slightly better scaling vs. clockspeed, but that is mainly because of the doubled cache (16% performance increase vs. 15% clockspeed increase). Also the main memory on the X2 6000+ runs at 376 MHz while the 5000+ runs its memory at 373 MHz (a small difference admittedly). 3D Mark 2006 This updated benchmark is a bit more tough on graphics cards, so in the game tests we should see a much smaller scaling effect. On the more optimized CPU benchmarks though, we could see a much more appreciable difference.
Just as expected, the GT and HDR tests were graphics bound while the CPU tests showed good scaling. When talking pure percentages, the X2 6000+ scores quite nicely compared to the 5000+.
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Copyright 1999-2007 PenStar Systems, LLC. |
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