Wonderchild

Choosing The Platform

In the choice between AMD and Intel, there’s little debate. If we’re looking for the fastest gaming performance, it’s going to be with NVIDIA SLI. With Intel SLI products not yet widely available, we’re going with AMD. (This article is being written in May 2005). However, even if Intel SLI boards were widely available, the Athlon FX-57 CPU would still our choice for the fastest gaming system. The FX-55 is already faster in real-world gaming than the P4 EE 3.73GHz CPU (and does so at almost a $250 savings) and the Athlon FX-57 should be even faster. Our FX-57 was a pre-production model.

AMD Athlon FX-57
$950
http://www.amd.com

What makes Opteron 100’s different from Athlon64’s?

While the original Athlon FX-51 was a Socket 940 part and essentially identical to an Opteron 146, today’s Socket 939 Athlon64 FX’s are different. The Athlon 64 FX-57 differs from the traditional Athlon64 line-up in that it features 1MB of L2 cache rather than 512KB found in some AMD designs, and because it represents the fastest core clock speed. Both Opterons and Athlon64s have the same fundamental AMD64 core design.

The Opteron platform is designed to handle mission-critical tasks. For any given clockspeed, there are three versions of the Opteron: the 1xx, 2xx, and 8xx series. That is, the Opteron 152, Opteron 252, and Opteron 852 all run at the same 2.6GHz. In a single CPU system, they will all perform identically. The Opteron 152 only works in a single-socket system. The 252 can work in dual-socket systems and the 800 series will work in an 8-way system. Athlon64 CPUs only function in single-socket systems.



While both Athlons and Opterons have on-die dual-channel DDR controllers, the Socket 940 Opteron architecture uses Registered ECC DDR-RAM. Registered RAM is slower, but more reliable. The Athlon 64 FX supports ECC memory but not registered RAM. I’ll talk more about Registered ECC in tomorrow’s article.

Running Total: $950