Mesh Xtreme FX60

Speculation has been rife as to when AMD would release a dual-core version of its Athlon 64 FX processor, and now we finally have one: the Athlon 64 FX-60.

Mesh and Evesham are never slow on the uptake when it comes to new technology, and both managed to provide us with review review systems, namely the Mesh Xtreme FX60 and Evesham Axis FX 60 Fireball.

You can see a picture of the Evesham Axis FX 60 Fireball (referenced throughout this review) and its scores here.

Although each obviously houses the new FX-60 processor, there are some important differences. That said, both are priced the same at £2,199 including VAT.
Despite initial rumours that the FX-60 would house two of the 2.8GHz cores seen in the FX-57, AMD has decided to drop the clock speed of both cores to 2.6GHz ­ the same as the single core of the slightly older FX-55 processor.

Like the FX-57, the FX-60 is built around the current Socket 939 design and supports SSE3 (streaming SIMD extensions 3); the latter is designed to aid performance during gaming and multimedia applications, but few software titles take advantage of it at present.

The FX-60 has a total of 2MB L2 cache (each core houses 1MB of L2) and will work in conjunction with PC1600, PC2100, PC2700 and PC3200 DDR memory. As expected, there’s still no support for DDR2 memory. Reports are circulating that AMD will soon release a DDR2-compatible processor, but we have nothing firm to go on as yet.

Total effective data bandwidth for the processor sits at 14.4Gbytes/sec ­ the same as both the FX-55 and FX-57 models. The FX-60 is also made using the same 90nanometer fabrication process as on the X2 4800+ dual-core processor the previous top-dog dual-core chip from AMD. If you like big numbers, you’ll be pleased to hear the approximate transistor count sits at a mindblowing 233.2 million.

When new processors arrive on the scene, concerns are often raised about operating temperature. The FX-60 has a maximum ambient case temperature of 65ºC and, according to AMD, heatsinks recommended for use with the dual-core X2 4800+ will provide adequate cooling for the FX-60.

As for pricing, AMD tells us the FX-60 will be available at $1,031 (£587.25) for a boxed version. Before the release of the FX-60, this was AMD’s stated price for the FX-57, and we expect the introduction of the FX-60 to drive the price of older processors down a fair whack.

Before we move on to the two review systems, it’s worth mentioning how the FX-60 performs on our standard test rig. In PCmark05 it managed to clock up a score of 5,991. For reference, the X2 4800+ scored 4,832. In our Cinebench test, which runs various 3D tasks, the FX-60 hit 690 ­ 50 more than the X2 4800+.

You can see how its performance compares to other CPUs at www.reportlabs.com.