Athlon FX-62 Review - PAGE 1

Today we take a look at AMD's flagship processor, the FX-62.

We were fortunate enough to have AMD provide us with an AM2 X2 5000+ for the socket AM2 launch, but as soon as we could, we wanted to get our hands on the new top of the line processor. I was very curious to see how much farther I could push it than the 5000+, with which I managed to reach a very respectable 3GHz (200MHz more than the stock speed of the XF-62, and the probable clock speed of the upcoming FX-64).

The FX-62 is AMD's current flagship product and runs at a blistering 2.8GHz. It has 2MB of L2 cache - 1MB per core - and supports DDR2-800 memory. Make no mistake about it folks, this is a seriously fast processor, a worthy successor to AMD's FX-60, which is its highest speed DDR memory part at 2.6GHz.

We'd like to thank AMD for providing us with an FX-62 for use in our participation in the MULTI-GPU article, which we will soon be releasing :-)

All of AMD's AM2 parts share the following common features:

• Manufactured in Fab 30 in Dresden, Germany on a 90 nm SOI process
• 940-pin micro-PGA AM2 packaging
• DDR2 memory controller supporting DDR2-667 for all chips and DDR2-800 for the X2 and FX
• Single HyperTransport channel for up to 8 GB/sec combined I/O
• Reduced power consumption, including new Energy Efficient models (details below)
• AMD hardware virtualization support
• Keyed ZIF socket to ensure only correct AM2 processor can be installed

For more information on AMD's socket AM2 features and lineup, please see our X2 5000+ review.

In order to make sure you get a good idea of the FX-62's performance, we will be comparing it to a large number of other high speed dual core processors that we've reviewed in the past:

• AMD AM2 X2 5000+
• AMD Opteron 170
• AMD FX-60
• Intel D 930
• Intel D 840

Why are we not comparing the FX-62 to the Conroe?

Simple really... the Conroe is not released.... YET :-)