AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+

An excellent chip, if you're trapped in AM2-world with no way to escape to vastly superior, and cheaper, Core2-land.

The release of this 3GHz X2 chip from AMD is a surprising one, considering the tough seven months of Core 2 supremacy the CPU giant has faced. That’s surprising in a bad way, like when you walk in on your grandmother dressing and it turns out she’s a man. A wrinkly, 70 year-old man… with a hernia.

Still on the old 90nm tech, the 6000+ is just a minor speed boost – making us wonder what indeed is the point. Sure it’s 200MHz faster and $200 cheaper than granddaddy FX-62, but we’re struggling to figure out why this chip at 400MHz more than the 5000+ should be given a rating of 6000+. Something tells us the marketing droids wanted a bigger number to match the competitor’s – it’s certainly discouraging to see AMD play Intel games.

Performance-wise it’s the same old hat we’re afraid. Against the $300 cheaper Core 2 Duo E6700 it trails abysmally, with LAME multithreaded completing in 1m 22s compared to 57s, VirtualDubMod in 2m 50s compared to 2m 43s, and SuperPiMod a ridiculously high 3m 12.406s compared to 1m 48.203s. Only Cinebench allowed the 6000+ to play ball, drawing effectively even at 826CB compared to 827CB.

Overclocking showed a chip pretty much already stretched to its limits, the FSB unable to boot into Windows when set above 220MHz on our ASUS M2N32 SLI Deluxe, giving an effective 3225MHz. While this is stable, the E6700 can go higher with little difficulty and be more effective per clock. We’re not even going to talk about the potential of the E4300 – it’s well documented in this month’s feature.

In short the 6000+ is simply not a smart buy, unless you’ve already significantly invested in AMD infrastructure, or specifically need the higher memory bandwidth of the AM2 platform, which for the majority of home users is not the case. Given this, it’s fortunate for AMD that we don’t score CPUs – the 6000+ just doesn’t deliver the goods.