Introduction
AMD's Athlon 64 FX-62 was launched in May 2006 and still remains the fastest AM2 processor around. We took a look at it and surmised that whilst it was fast, Intel's Core 2 Extreme X6800 was better.
Intel then added the quad-core whammy in November. It pushed consumer-level performance even higher and, frankly, left AMD trailing in the high-end desktop CPU market.
To appease the enthusiast somewhat, AMD launched its Quad-FX platform in late November and we followed up our initial look by exhaustively testing Quad-FX's 'megatasking' qualities.
AMD's native quad-core implementation, codenamed Barcelona, is currently slated for Q2 2007. In the meantime, however, AMD has added in a couple of energy-efficient processors to its line-up and bolstered the top end with the Athlon 64 X2 6000+: the first AM2 processor to run at 3GHz.
We'll take a look at its performance and also the value proposition offered by this £300 CPU. Will it beat out the Core 2 Duo/Quads? Read on to find out.
