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At the end of 2005 AMD had a superb range of desktop processors but there was a serious anomaly right at the top of the range. The £740 Athlon 64 FX-57 was supposed to be the performance king, and if you looked at isolated benchmarks it was the fastest processor in AMD’s range, however the dual core £560 Athlon 64 X2 4800+ was clearly a better processor for most PC users.

AMD has resolved the situation by launching the latest version of the Athlon FX as FX-60 rather than FX-59, and the big news is that it’s a dual core processor. The new FX has a clock speed of 2.6GHz, which is nominally 200MHz slower than the 2.8GHz FX-57, while the X2 4800+ runs at 2.4GHz. In many respects the FX-60 is a pair of FX-55s in a single Socket 939 processor, or if you prefer you could think of it as an Athlon 64 X2 5000+. Naturally the FX-60 is unlocked so while comparison is a little unfair let’s see how the FX-60 stacks up against the FX-57.