Test System Setup

Processor(s): AMD Athlon FX-60 and X2 3800+
Motherboard(s): nVidia nForce 4 X16
Graphics Card(s): 2 X Gigabyte GeForce 7900GTX in SLI (Supplied by Gigabyte)
Memory: 2 X 1GB Corsair PC3500LL PRO DDR (Supplied by Corsair Micro)
Hard Disk(s): WD Raptor 74GB 10,000RPM SATA (Supplied by Western Digital)
Operating System: Windows XP Professional SP2
Drivers: nVidia ForceWare 84.21 and DX9c


This article would not have been made possible without cooperation from Gigabyte as their Athlon FX-60 processor saw a bucket load of benchmarks over a period of three days.

While we are concentrating on the processors, the review follows our standard VGA layout as we are more interested on the impact of the two processors in synthetic and real world gaming performance as opposed to direct memory and CPU performance.

Please don’t leave comments saying why we didn’t compare chipset or memory or CPU performance. We have made it clear already that we are only interested in investigating the impact on gaming performance between the two processors.




3DMark03

Version and / or Patch Used: Build 360
Developer Homepage: http://www.futuremark.com
Product Homepage: http://www.futuremark.com/products/3dmark03/
Buy It Here




By combining full DX8 and partial DX9 support with completely new tests and graphics over the previous version, 3DMark03 continues the legacy of being the industry standard 3D benchmark.

Please Note: Due to recent events with the 3DMark03 series, we are adding results purely for those who are still in favor of 3DMark03. These results should not be taken too seriously and are only added for interest sakes.




Like we have found when overclocking our processor in our regular graphics card articles, the processor speed doesn’t give huge performance increases with the more expensive and more power FX-60.