Labs

The Athlon 64 FX-60 is the fastest Socket 939 processor available. It's a dual-core processor based on the Toledo core, with double the level 2 cache of the X2 4200+ and X2 4600+.

The FX-60's 2.6GHz clock speed is higher than the other Socket 939 processors in the group, so it was much quicker than the Athlon 64 X2 chips in our audio-encoding and image-editing benchmarks, with scores of 121 and 167. Its twin cores gave it an excellent score of 230 in the video-encoding test, and its overall score of 174 put it sixth overall. As with the Athlon 64 X2 4200+, heat problems meant the FX-60 couldn't be effectively overclocked.

The FX-60's main problem is its price. If you want a new chip for your Socket 939 motherboard, the Athlon X2 64 4600+ isn't much slower and costs just £156. Intel's Core 2 Duo E6400 is faster than the FX-60, and you could buy one along with a new LGA775 motherboard and new DDR2 memory for less than the price of the AMD processor.