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Conclusion

The Athlon FX-60 is a very impressive processor - with outstanding performance.

If there was anything to criticize, it would be that it did not overclock as much as I had hoped, or at least not with the stock heatsink / fan unit I was using with it. We are considering some more overclocking experiments, as I feel that with better cooling and possibly a different motherboard it might go faster. AMD suggests the Asus A8N32-SLI / A8N-SLI "Premium" / "Deluxe" 939-pin motherboards for the FX-60 at this time.

I was surprised when the FX-60 did not function at 9x300MHz, as that same motherboard was able to run a 4000+ processor at that rating; this is why I suspect that the memory controller was programmed sub-optimally by the BIOS. Again, I wonder if one of AMD's recommended motherboards would fair better here - this is something we definitely intend on testing!

The business benchmarks were dominated by the overclocked FX-60, and the stock FX-60 was only slightly slower than an overclocked 4000+. Raw processing power, as shown by the Sandra CPU and Cinebench benchmarks was outstanding; and memory bandwidth was quite good given the limitations of the maximum memory bandwidth reachable on our testbed - a whopping 285MHz. Media encoding and data compression performance were also outstanding.

The dual cores definitely did well when running two processor bound applications - if they did not saturate memory, the performance of running two programs simultaneously was identical to the programs running by themselves as if running the two together had no impact on performance.

Gaming results, while not directly comparable to our earlier motherboard reviews were outstanding; with great frame rates - I can hardly wait to see how multi-threaded games will perform on this beast! The next stage is for us to go through our suite of high resolution, anti-aliased and ansitropic filtered gaming tests, just to see what those CPU benchmarks will look like when the FX-60 is paired with SLI or Crossfire.

Given how positive this review, and the conclusion is, you'd be hard pressed to find a more positive review from me. I only write what I feel to be the actual, testable, and repeatable results. The fact is, the FX-60 blows my socks off. Without exception, it is by far the fastest dual core processor I've used, and the fastest single core testing I've done barely manages to exceed its results, and only when I was able to run the memory faster on the single core device.

If you have a spare $1031-$1100 in your pocket, and you must have the absolutely latest single processor with dual cores for the fastest gaming - or even business system, you can't go wrong with an FX-60.