We managed to get our hands on the Athlon64 5000+ just a day before it was officially launched and had our article online just in time the NDA lifted. That was one of the two CPUs that AMD launched that day. The second CPU, the FX-62, is currently AMD’s flagship product and only landed in our labs a few days back. Speaking to some other Editors around the world, we found out that the FX-62 has yet to reach quite a few labs so it seems that AMD really needs to sort out the availability of products to media on time.

Now, we weren’t that impressed with the Athlon64 5000+ in the first place and after our performance preview of the Intel E6600 Conroe, things started looking even worse for AMD. Lets find out if the FX-62 is a saving grace for AMD or simply an “Extremely Expensive” product. Currently available at US$ 1200 (approximately AED 4500), the FX-62 is a 2.8GHz dual core CPU with 2MB L2 Cache. Its based on the same 90nm Windsor core as the Athlon64 5000+ and supports DDR2-800 modules.

There isn’t much else to talk about since we’ve already covered the Athlon64 5000+ so lets kick things off. The tested we used for the FX-62 was identical to the one we used for the Athlon64 5000+ and is made up of the ASUS M3N32 SLI motherboard with 2 x 512MB Corsair DDR2-800 modules and an nVidia 7800GTX graphics card. For comparison, we’ve chosen the Socket 939 based X2-4800+ and FX-60 CPUs while on the Intel side, we have their 955 Extreme Edition as well as numbers from the performance preview of our E6600 Conroe/Core 2 CPU.