Introduction

The battle for supremacy in the high performance processor arena is getting hotter with the introduction of AMD's latest Athlon 64 FX-53 processor. AMD has upped the ante in this battle with a highly clocked processor that now runs at 2.4GHz while retaining the design and functionality of the Athlon 64 FX-51. The new Athlon 64 FX-53 is expected to break new grounds, set new heights and make it even tougher for their competitor, Intel, to keep up.

Sadly, motherboards based on the Socket-940 form factor are few. Although only a handful of them are available, they are actually some of the best motherboards around and we can only say that you probably won't go too wrong choosing any them, where most of them are based on NVIDIA's nForce3 solution. Still, we'd prefer VIA's chipset over NVIDIA since VIA's solution has been proven to be better in terms of graphics performance. However, all that may change when NVIDIA launch the new nForce3-250 that comes with better specifications, and hopefully, further push the performance of the Athlon 64 to even greater heights.

In order to get an Athlon 64 FX system, we've mentioned before that one of the requirements include DDR400 Registered memory. Until today, such memory modules are still rare although we've seen a couple of announcements from various memory module manufacturers. Prices are better today, but still nowhere comparable to most mainstream DDR400 modules. This is perhaps the biggest hurdle yet for AMD to popularize the Athlon 64 FX.

64-bit processing for the desktop environment is still nowehere to be seen and it will probably remain until Microsoft is ready to launch their next Windows XP 64-bit operating system. The announcements made by Intel earlier last month about supporting 64-bit processing in their Xeon processors was probably the best piece of news for AMD, since a lot more effort would now be concentrated into making this happen. However, it would be a challenge for AMD to design their future processors to physically support more than 4GB of installed memory since the Athlon 64 can possibly take up to only 2GB of DDR400 memory (remember that the advantage of 64-bit is about breaking that 4GB addressable memory?). This isn't that much of a concern for the Athlon 64 FX. Sadly, there has been no announcements of 64-bit support for Pentium 4 although we know that Intel is keeping that option opened.

So, today we have some of the latest processors tested and benchmarked in our lab. We'll be comparing the performance of the latest AMD Athlon 64 FX-53, AMD Athlon 64 3400+ and the Intel Pentium 4 3.4GHz Extreme Edition. In order to give you a better feel of these new processor's performance, we've also included the performance numbers of Intel's recently launched 'Prescott' processors. Before we go into the results, let's look at the technical specificaitons of the processors below :-