AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+: Competing with Aggressive Pricing
by Anand Lal Shimpi on February 20, 2007 3:37 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
The Test - Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit
While the major benchmark suites still lack support for the OS, we are trying our hands at testing CPUs under Windows Vista with this review. By now we know not to expect a significant performance difference between Windows Vista and XP, but given Vista's compelling feature set we see it becoming the dominant PC OS for new system builds in the enthusiast community.
With a substantial number of our CPU benchmarks available in 64-bit versions, using the 64-bit version of Vista wasn't a difficult choice. Since we're also using modern components in our testbeds, driver support wasn't an issue either. Given what we saw in our Vista Performance Guide, the ability to use more memory for features like SuperFetch warrants the switch to 64-bit if you don't have any legacy hardware without driver support.
The only other change we've made to our test beds is the use of 4GB of memory; by no means is it necessary (yet) but Vista's added memory requirements coupled with its better use of free memory makes 4GB a good target for enthusiasts.
| CPU: | AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+ (3.0GHz/1MBx2) AMD Athlon 64 X2 5600+ (2.8GHz/1MBx2) AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+ (2.6GHz/512KBx2) AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ (2.0GHz/512KBx2) Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 (2.66GHz/4MB) Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 (2.40GHz/4MB) Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 (1.86GHz/2MB) |
| Motherboard: | ASUS P5B Deluxe (P965) ASUS M2N32-SLI Deluxe (nForce 590 SLI) |
| Chipset: | Intel P965 NVIDIA nForce 590 SLI |
| Chipset Drivers: | Intel 8.1.1.1010 (Intel) Integrated Vista Drivers (NVIDIA) |
| Hard Disk: | Seagate 7200.9 300GB SATA |
| Memory: | Corsair XMS2 DDR2-800 4-4-4-12 (1GB x 4) |
| Video Card: | NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX |
| Video Drivers: | NVIDIA ForceWare 100.54 |
| Desktop Resolution: | 1600 x 1200 |
| OS: | Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit |
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Roy2001 - Tuesday, February 20, 2007 - link
Trouble with 965P? That's rare case. 1st time to me actually. My DS3+E6600 system has yet to give me trouble. My old Athlon systems, both desktop and laptop, do not work very well with USB/PCI wifi card. Laptop need to boot/wake without wifi card inserted and desktop will lost connection once every day.I am not an fanboy, I am just stating the fact. As you can see, I have more AMD systems than Intel system.
johnsonx - Wednesday, February 21, 2007 - link
Your wifi card problems were far more likely due to the drivers, and possibly the cards themselves, than due to the AMD platform. I've seen both of those problems on all manner of systems, both AMD and Intel. Besides, it just isn't the type of problem I would hang on the platform.JarredWalton - Tuesday, February 20, 2007 - link
P965 at launch was really quite flaky. Many people (me among them) had memory compatibility problems, and not just with elite memory. The BIOS updates have now pretty much fixed any problems, but some of those updates took 2-3 months after launch to fix all of the important stuff (depending on motherboard). And let's not even get into the "DirectX 9" G965 fiasco... I think we're still waiting on drivers that are even remotely able to run DX9 content, and it's still slow at that.Thatguy97 - Thursday, June 18, 2015 - link
man i bought myself a couple x2s after the price cuts back then still used a core 2 duo e6600 as a primary but they were so cheap i couldnt help myself had to get a 5600+