As mentioned, Athlon 64 X2 5000+ is a dual-core CPU running at 2.6 GHz, achieved by multiplying its 200 MHz base clock by 13. It has two 512 KB L2 memory caches, one for each core. The other dual-core AMD CPUs we reviewed recently and included in this benchmark were Athlon 64 X2 4600+, which runs at 2.4 GHz and has two 512 KB L2 memory caches, and Athlon 64 FX-60, which runs at 2.6 GHz and has two 1 MB caches. Both are based on socket 939 platform.

The comparison between Athlon 64 X2 5000+ and Athlon FX-60 will be very interesting, since both run at the same clock rate, but 5000+ supports DDR2 and FX-60 supports regular DDR – but with a bigger cache.

Also, as we explained, even though Athlon 64 X2 5000+ supports DDR2-800 memories, its memory bus works at 742 MHz and not at 800 MHz.

In Figure 4, you can see the complete specs from the CPU we reviewed. It is very important to note that several websites posted wrong specs for Athlon 64 X2 5000+, since they were all speculating about the specs for this CPU as no real product was available before today.

Figure 4: Athlon 64 X2 5000+ specs.

We didn’t compare these CPUs with Intel counterparts (namely Pentium D and Pentium Extreme Edition) because unfortunately Intel didn’t provide us samples for reviewing. A pity.