We didn’t see any performance improvement by the use of DDR2 memories instead of DDR. In fact, Athlon 64 FX-60 and Athlon 64 X2 5000+ achieved the same performance level in all benchmarks we conducted, except on three SYSmark2004 segments: document creation (where Athlon 64 FX-60 was 6.37% faster), data analysis (where Athlon 64 FX-60 was 3.94% faster) and communication (where Athlon 64 X2 5000+ was 6.34% faster).
Memory bandwidth measured with Sandra Lite 2007, which we didn’t include in the main body of our review, was of 7,914 MB/s, an impressive mark compared to previous AMD64 CPUs, where the maximum theoretical memory bandwidth was of 3,200 MB/s or 6,400 MB/s when using dual channel. However, as we were using DDR2-800 memories in dual channel, it should be somewhere near 12,800 MB/s (800 MHz x 128 bits / 8), at least in theory.
One of the problems we have already explained. Even though Athlon 64 X2 5000+ supports DDR2-800, its memory bus works at 742 MHz, not 800 MHz. Even then its maximum bandwidth would be 11,872 MB/s. Our Athlon 64 X2 5000+ used only 66.66% of this, achieving a performance as if the memories were DDR456 in dual channel configuration.
The DDR2 memories on our review were configured as DDR2-800.
Since this processor is being launched today, its price should be very high – and you will also need a new motherboard. But it will probably be released costing less than Athlon 64 FX-60, thus a better buy than Athlon 64 FX-60 if you are really a performance freak but want to save some money.
If you are a regular user we suggest you to hold on until the prices drop. Even for the performance addicts we would recommend to wait a little bit to see if our suspicion regarding AMD CPUs with new memory bus speeds comes true or not.
PS: Originally we have benchmarked Athlon 64 X2 5000+ with 1 GB DDR2-800 memory while other systems had 2 GB DDR. We have already corrected that. We have done the benchmarks again with 2 GB DDR2-800 and corrected all charts and text. The comparison now reflects all systems with 2 GB RAM.
