You've seen the Core 2 Extreme X6800 and the Athlon 64 FX-62 duke it out in our Core 2 Performance Review, but now we're offering you a glimpse into the future as we try to determine what the upcoming Core 2 Extreme X6900 and Athlon 64 FX-64 will bring to the table, performance-wise.



In the following pages, we will attempt to take a sneak peek into the performance levels of these upcoming CPU. Both the AMD Athlon 64 FX-64 and Intel Core 2 Extreme X6900 are merely frequency updates to their predecessors. The Athlon 64 FX-64 should be clocked at 3GHz (up from 2.8GHz of the Athlon 64 FX-62) and carry the same 2x1MB L2 cache and 125W TDP design. The Core 2 Extreme X6900 will also be identical to the current X6800, but will run at 3.2GHz instead (up from 2.93GHz). As of the point of publication, both CPU vendors do not endorse the availability of these parts, but from their respective projected roadmaps and educated speculation based on information available, the specs of the upcoming CPU variants are probable.

For comparison we will be reusing our benchmark scores from our Core 2 Performance Review article, which includes the Athlon 64 FX-62, Core 2 Duo E6600, E6700 and Core 2 Extreme X6800. The test bed configuration will be the same as before as well, but we will list it down below for reference. Since our Athlon 64 FX-62 and Core 2 Extreme X6800 processors are both multiplier unlocked, we are able to overclock them to these speeds through a simple multiplier increase. All other settings like memory and bus speeds remain intact. The CPU-Z screen below show the overclocked CPUs that tally with the speculated frequencies of the FX-64 and X6900 respectively.

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