UT2003, Call of Duty, Quake III
Our UT2003 low-detail test places the onus on the subsystem, that is, the CPU, RAM, and motherboard interaction. Only the 3.4GHz Extreme Edition can hold a light to any Athlon 64 CPU here, and we also see Model 3400+ doing extremely well, no doubt helped by lovely 2.5-2-2-6 latencies. Brute MHz power sees the FX-53 burst through the 200-FPS barrier, which is over 60% faster than an Athlon XP-M 2500+'s performance.
Quake III's fast on any top-end system.
Call of Duty is run with a speed bias. Both FXs look good here. We postulated that the performance of the FX-53 CPU was predictable. It had to be faster than the FX-51's, yet we also knew that no major architectural enhancements would limit the gain to less than 10% in most benchmarks, unlike the transition between Northwood and Prescott cores for Intel's Pentium 4.
