AMD Socket AM2: Athlon 64 FX-62 and nForce5 590 SLI

System Setup and Notes

Hardware

AMD Athlon 64 FX-62 Test Systems
Processor(s)	AMD Athlon 64 FX-62, 2.8GHz, 90nm, Windsor, 1MiB-core, AM2 AMD Athlon 64 FX-60, 2.6GHz, 90nm, Toledo, 1MiB-core, 939 Intel Pentium Extreme Edition 965, 3.73GHz, 65nm, Presler, 2MiB-core, LGA775
Mainboard(s)	ASUS M2N32-SLI Deluxe (nForce5 590 SLI) ASUS A8N32-SLI (nForce4 SLI x16) ASUS P5WD2-E Premium (Intel i975X)
Memory	2 x 512MiB Corsair XMS2-8500 2 x 512MiB Corsair DDR-400 2 x 512MiB Corsair XMS2-5400UL
Memory Timings	4-4-4-12-1T @ 400MHz 2-2-2-5-1T @ 200MHz 3-2-2-8-2T @ 333MHz
BIOS Versions	0117 (M2N32-SLI) 1103 (A8N32-SLI) 0501 (P5WD2-E Premium)
Disk Drive	160GB Seagate Barracuda ST3160812AS 7200.9 SATA2 160GB Seagate Barracuda ST3160812AS 7200.9 SATA2 Maxtor DiamondMax 10 6V300F0 SATA2
Graphics Card(s)	NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GTX (650/800)
Graphics Driver	NVIDIA ForceWare 91.27
Operating System	Windows XP Professional, SP2, 32-bit

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Software

Game Software
ScienceMark 2.0 picCOLOR 4.0 Realstorm 2004 HEXUS Crypto Cinebench 2003 Kribibench 1.1 DivX6 + VirtualDub LAME version 3.97 MMX multithreaded HEXUS Pifast Far Cry Splinter Cell Quake 4

Notes

As well as running the three high-end CPUs at their rated clocks, we also benchmarked Athlon 64 FX-62 at the FX-60's 2.6GHz clockspeed (with a simple drop of the multiplier) so as to better judge the merits of the new DDR2 memory controller. All benchmarks were run three times and the median value reported. If any of the collected figures deviated by a substantial amount we ran them all again to generate reliable results.

If you have any questions about any of our testing methods, please let us know in the HEXUS.community.

ForceWare 91.27 Notes

Since Rel90 is a new major driver branch, it gets its own notes section here. The driver that'll make it out to end users is actually 91.28, but that's just 91.27 with some Quadro FX-specific fixes, with GeForce support and performance unchanged.

The big new things in Rel90, other than the new control panel we talked out earlier, is enhanced PureVideo support to add the following on supporting GPUs:

Added noise reduction post processing
Added image sharpening post processing
Improved inverse telecine algorithm
Improved de-interlacing algorithm
Improved compatibility with third party MPEG-2 decoders

And as for the new control panel, it gets options the old UI doesn't expose. Those are colour temperature adjust, and RGB gamma adjust for VMR9 overlays in linear colour space. Both are useful for improving image quality, and they mark the freeze of the 'old' control panel UI in terms of further development. Bugs will be fixed as seen, but further feature addition will only take place in the new control panel UI, NVIDIA hoping to further integrate other software into the interface which the display driver and nTune 5.0 now share.

IQ and performance seems good (not much deviation from 84.21 performance wise, and IQ looks the same), and although we've not investigated in enough depth to conclude absolutely conclusively, we're happy enough with the driver to use it for this piece.