AMD Athlon 64FX first impressions

Well today we received 2 NEW AMD CPU's, the Athlon 64FX and Athlon 64 3200+.
The mainboards were pre-production Gigabyte, GA-K8NNXP and GA-K8NNXP-940. A
good start CPU coolers fit like the P4 so the risk of damage when fitting is
much lower. We found that the N-vidia FX5900 (Asus) video cards did not
perform that well and that the ATI Radeon 9800 pro (Sapphire) worked much
better and had an easier install on both systems. We monitored both CPU's
with a NAMAS calibrated thermocouple 'K' type recording 48c idle for the
Athlon 64 and 56c under load, the FX chip was hotter by 4c at idle and under
load but neither caused a problem, though this is on a bench not in a case.
We loaded Windows XP some updates and patches both ran stable on the 3 day
burn in test, though the 32bit OS on the Athlon 64 3200+ showed results no
better than the Athlon XP3200+, the FX did how ever but at double the price
you would expect this. Then came out our BETA Windows XP64 OS, loaded well
on both machines and seemed stable, then we loaded the drivers and bang,
blue screens, rebooting and all sorts of driver conflicts, we have narrowed
it down to the USB2 driver the IEEE1394 and onboard sound, if we disable
any one of these the other 2 work but not all 3 together. So at the moment
we have a cheap soundcard in which has helped but not entirely cured the
problem. Both systems ran quite a bit faster using the 64bit OS though in
real terms it was not something you would see by eye. We used 1Gb (2x512Mb)
of OCZ EL DDR RAM PC3200 Dual Channel Platinum memory CL 2-2-3-5. At
present cost of the chips and the 63bit OS make this an expensive option and
in comparison to a 3.2GHz P4 system the Athlon 64 3200+ was 20% more
expensive
for no gain if you used a 32bit OS, the Athlon XP3200+ would be a cheaper
and better bet. The price of XP64 will determine the success of this chip,
chip prices may fall in the future but Microsoft is not known for dropping
the price of it's OS and XP64 bit edition is likely to be 50% more than the
32bit version.
--
Chris
Technical director CKCCOMPUSCRIPT
Apple Computers, Intel, Roland audio, ATI, Microsoft, Sun Solaris, Cisco and
Silicone Graphics.
Wholesale distributor and specialist audio visual computers and servers
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