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AMD Athlon 64 FX-70 Overclocking February 15, 2007 |
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Summary: With Athlon 64 FX-70 CPUs starting at $305, AMD's Quad FX platform is the cheapest way to get into quad-core gaming. In this article we take a look at the overclocking potential of the FX-70, comparing its performance to a slew of other quad-core CPUs that are competing for your hard-earned dollars. How does the FX-70 stack up to the others when overclocked? Find out in this article!
 Introduction | Page:: ( 1 / 12 ) |
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Quad-core gaming: it’s coming
The quad-core gaming era is about to begin. In less than a week, the world’s first quad-core enabled game will hit store shelves, Gas Powered Games/THQ’s highly anticipated 3D RTS, Supreme Commander.
Supreme Commander is the brainchild of Chris Taylor and is the spiritual successor to the hit RTS Total Annihilation. When it ships next week, Supreme Commander will be a technological tour de force. The game will support multi-threading out-of-the-box, with major game threads devoted for aspects such as graphics, physics, and unit movement, and smaller threads for things like sound and networking. The game also supports maps of massive scale. With the game’s strategic zoom feature, you can zoom out to see the entire region, or zoom in to see individual units battling it out up close. Literally hundreds of air, land, and naval units can be engaged in combat at once. We asked Gas Powered what kind of performance impact quad-core CPUs can have on performance and we were told that the game runs about 35% faster on quad-core processors versus dual-core when the game is CPU-bound.
If RTS games aren’t your thing and you prefer first-person shooters, you’re still in for a treat. Games such as Unreal Tournament 3 and Valve’s Half-Life 2: Episode Two have been designed with quad-core CPUs in mind. And of course, there’s also the title everyone’s been talking about lately, Crysis. Crytek has confirmed that Crysis will take advantage of quad-core when the game ships later this year.
AMD’s FX-70: Cheapest quad-core available
Based on these prices, you can pick up AMD’s Quad FX platform for just under $1,000 at $960 total.
In comparison, the Core 2 Quad Q6600 is priced at $848.99 at Zipzoomfly.com. You’d then need to spend at least $110 for a barebones SLI motherboard like the ASUS P5NSLI, based on NVIDIA’s nForce 570 SLI chipset, while a comparable motherboard based on the nForce 680i chipset would cost around $250.
By going the AMD route, you’d also get the benefit of upgrading to eight processing cores later this year when AMD’s native quad-core “Barcelona” processors debut. Intel’s competitor to Barcelona codenamed “Yorkfield” should also appear before the end of the year, but it’s unknown at this time if today’s Core 2 motherboards will be compatible with Yorkfield.
Of course, the Intel platform has the advantage of being single socket, so each platform has their fair share of pros and cons.
The beauty of the Athlon 64 FX-70 of course is its price. It sells for nearly half the price of the flagship FX-74, while still retaining the FX-74’s key features, namely it’s 1MB of L2 cache per core (2MB total). With the FX-70 selling for substantially less than the FX-74 yet running just 400MHz slower, the natural instinct of any hardware enthusiast is going to be to overclock it. That’s exactly what we were eager to see today. Just how far can this chip be overclocked? Let’s find out!
| Features and overclocking | Page:: ( 2 / 12 ) |
As we just mentioned, the Athlon 64 FX-70 shares all the key specs found in the rest of the Quad FX platform yet it costs significantly less.
If you recall, the Quad FX processors are based around AMD’s new 1207-pin socket dubbed Socket F (ASUS refers to it as Socket L1). With the debut of the new socket, AMD now uses organic land-grid array packaging and the pins are now located on the motherboard itself rather than the underside of the processor. This makes processor installation a lot easier, as you no longer have to worry about bent pins on the processor.
Fundamentally the new Quad FX processors are based on AMD’s Opteron architecture. Like AMD’s Opteron processors, each FX CPU has its own dedicated dual-channel memory interface, with two DIMM slots associated with each processor. This gives the quad FX platform twice the memory bandwidth of AMD’s AM2 platform, 12.8GB/sec peak memory bandwidth on an AM2 Athlon 64 FX-62 system versus 25.6GB/sec for FX-70. As a result, total system bandwidth goes from 20.8GB/sec on AM2 to 33.6GB/sec for a quad FX processor like the FX-70.
Of course, here we should remind you that in order to take advantage of this, you’ll need to populate all four DIMM slots with memory, otherwise the system will run in single-channel memory mode, resulting in slower performance. Also like Opteron, 4x4 systems also follow a non-uniform memory access model (NUMA), so you’ll need a NUMA-aware OS such as newer Linux builds, Windows Server 2003 64-bit Edition, or Windows Vista.
One key difference between the latest FX processors and Opteron however is that the FX CPUs support conventional, unbuffered, non-ECC memory. This means you can use the same off-the-shelf DDR2-800 or DDR2-667 memory already used for AM2 on the new FX CPUs.
This table sums up the Quad FX CPU lineup as it stands now:
| AMD's Quad FX Lineup | ||||
| CPU | L1 Cache | L2 Cache | Clock Speed | Price |
| Athlon 64 FX-74 | 128KB+128KB | 2x1MB | 3.0GHz | $999 Per Pair |
| Athlon 64 FX-72 | 128KB+128KB | 2x1MB | 2.8GHz | $799 Per Pair |
| Athlon 64 FX-70 | 128KB+128KB | 2x1MB | 2.6GHz | $599 Per Pair |
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Taking the FX-70 beyond 2.6GHz
Despite the efforts of a handful of other manufacturers, dual CPU overclocking has never truly taken off in the mainstream segment. Arguably the best attempt came from Abit way back in 1999 with their BP6 motherboard. One popular solution was to overclock two Celeron 366 processors to 550MHz, giving end users high-end performance at a fraction of the cost of using dual Pentium III or Xeon processors, but dual CPU overclocking on the AMD platform hasn’t been truly viable for one reason or another up until now.
With NVIDIA’s new nForce 680a chipset and the Quad FX platform, AMD enthusiasts finally have a dual-processing platform that they can truly with when it comes to overclocking.
It all starts with the ASUS L1N64-SLI WS motherboard, which is the only nForce 680a board on the market at this point. The L1N64-SLI WS is one extremely high-end motherboard, featuring four PCI Express graphics slots for expansion: three of the four graphics slots have enough room for dual-slot graphics cards like the GeForce 8800 GTS/GTX. The board even has a whopping 12 SATA ports!
Out-of-the-box the L1N64-SLI WS supports up to 10 USB ports, although the chipset can natively drive another 10 USBs with additional headers, and dual GigE Ethernet connections. The board is cooled entirely passively using an array of copper heatsinks and heat pipes to cool the chipset and VRM circuitry. This allows the motherboard to generate no noise, but we highly suggest you use the supplemental external fans ASUS provides if you intend to overclock your system.
For overclocking, the L1N64-SLI WS offers HyperTransport speeds up to 400MHz in 1MHz increments, and memory speeds of 400, 533, 667, and 800MHz. CPU voltages up to 1.40V are also provided in BIOS with an additional 200mV provided via the CPU vcore over-voltage BIOS setting, while memory voltages top out at 2.5V and HyperTransport voltages at 1.4V.
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Keep in mind that the L1N64-SLI WS is an extended ATX form factor motherboard, so you’ll need a large case in order to house it.
In order to keep the FX-70 processors as cool as possible for our overclocking endeavors, we decided to skip the stock AMD heatsink/fan units, opting instead to use a pair of Zalman CNPS9700 coolers. At stock speeds, we noted idle temps that were about 10 degrees Celsius cooler as a result of using the Zalman coolers, with the processor running around 31-35 degrees Celsius.
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The CNPS9700s aren’t officially on the list of approved Socket F coolers, but they mounted on the board just fine, although it was a very tight fit. In hindsight the CNPS 9500 is a little smaller and probably would have been easier to install because of this, but oh well, we were happy with our OC’ing results:
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We were able to overclock the FX-70’s to 3.12GHz (15.0x208). In order to get there we had to use the vcore over-voltage setting, which was set at the max setting of 200mV. We were actually able to boot up to much higher speeds, the CPU ran up to 3.2GHz with no problems. At that speed the system would boot as far as the Windows XP splash screen; at that point, the system wouldn’t lock up, but it wouldn’t boot into Windows either. It literally just sat there as if it wasn’t sure if it wanted to boot or not, with the HDD occasionally being accessed.
Because of this, we think we could have pushed the CPU further with a little more voltage. In fact, ASUS’ initial BIOS provided more CPU voltage options and we’ve asked ASUS if perhaps they’ll reconsider and integrate more voltage settings for the CPU. We’ll be keeping an eye on this to see if anything develops.
So how does the FX-70 perform in comparison to the other quad-core CPUs at 3.19GHz? Let’s find out!
| System Setup | Page:: ( 3 / 12 ) |
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 Extreme Edition QX6700@2.4GHz
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
| Media encoding and rendering | Page:: ( 4 / 12 ) |
Microsoft Windows Media Encoder 9
LAME MT MP3 Encoding
Cinebench 9.5
| Valve Multi-core benchmark and 3DMark 06 | Page:: ( 5 / 12 ) |
Futuremark 3DMark05
| F.E.A.R. | Page:: ( 6 / 12 ) |
F.E.A.R.
| Quake 4 | Page:: ( 7 / 12 ) |
Quake 4
| HL2 Lost Coast | Page:: ( 8 / 12 ) |
Lost Coast
| Company of Heroes | Page:: ( 9 / 12 ) |
Company of Heroes
| Multi-tasked Gaming – FEAR | Page:: ( 10 / 12 ) |
F.E.A.R.
| Multi-tasked Gaming – Quake 4 | Page:: ( 11 / 12 ) |
Quake 4
| Conclusion | Page:: ( 12 / 12 ) |
The FX-70 really shines though when it’s overclocked. We pushed our FX-70s to 3.12GHz and feel that we probably could have gone a little further if we’d had a little more voltage. At 3.12GHz though the FX-70 really impressed us, outperforming both the FX-74 and Intel’s Core 2 Quad Q6600 in some cases, both of which cost significantly more than the FX-70.
The only real downside to the Quad FX platform is the dearth of motherboards available at the moment. The ASUS L1N64-SLI WS is the only compatible motherboard right now. The L1N64-SLI WS is a great board and it’s decked out with features, but we can’t help but feel that if more motherboards were available on the market, prices would be a little lower. This in turn would make the Quad FX platform more affordable for enthusiasts on a budget who would like to get their feet wet with quad-core without breaking the bank.
For FiringSquad readers in this situation, fortunately we can report that the incremental upgrade path is a very viable option: simply buy one FX-70 processor now along with the L1N64-SLI WS motherboard and memory, and buy the second FX-70 CPU six months from now when you’ve got more money to splurge on an upgrade. By then CPU prices will be cheaper as well. The L1N64-SLI WS platform runs just fine with one FX-70 installed, the system BIOS and OS treats it just like a normal dual-core CPU.
Officially AMD would probably discourage end users from going this route, but in our opinion, it’s a very solid option for enthusiasts on a budget. It actually makes a lot of sense considering the lack of quad-core games out there today.
It’s surprising that AMD doesn’t promote this upgrade path more openly, as they’ve clearly got the least expensive quad-core solution by far with the FX-70. And by going the incremental upgrade route, the Quad FX platform is even more tempting.
Now all we’re waiting for is the quad-core games to ship. Fortunately we won’t have to wait too much longer for that to happen. Once that occurs, we can finally benchmark AMD’s Quad FX platform against Core 2 Quad and all the speculation on the two platforms and how they perform in games can finally be put to rest…