AMD 4×4 finally released

AMD has just announced their Quad FX solution, but it’s not exactly an answer to Intels Kentsfield. It’s not only slower, but is a clunkier setup thanks to the fact that you will have two physical CPU’s. The general concenus is that Kentsfield is faster, and more practical. Most of us realized this a long time ago though. This solution also proves to be a little more expensive, but has it’s own benefits which you can learn about in todays reviews.

AMD will be selling Athlon 64 FX-70, FX-72, and FX-74 processors in pairs with heatsinks for prices of $599, $799, and $999 respectively. That’s two 3.0GHz dual-core processors for just under a grand. The Asus QuadFX L1N64-SLI WS motherboard will sell for upwards of $300. For maximum performance, QuadFX will also require four DIMMs, which will be marginally more expensive than two DIMMs with a similar total capacity. Overall, the pricing structure makes the fastest QuadFX system more expensive than the fastest quad-core Intel-based system, but QuadFX does offer more features, so pricing isn’t out of line in our opinion. – HotHardware

Our real world testing today disproves my preconceptions entirely, and shows that in quite a few cases, the FX-74 is as fast, or even faster than the QX6700. We ran the numbers over and over again, and the FX-74 simply has the horsepower to compete with the QX6700 in the most CPU intensive applications. When the systems are completely maxed out and you’re running rendering, encoding, or multi-media applications, the difference between the two CPU’s is quite minimal, usually between 1 and 3 percent. – HardOCP