Athlon 64 FX-57 is expensive, rare, fast but is it worth it?

erek

erek

[H]F Junkie
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The AMD Athlon 64 FX-57 is the highest clocked FX processor for Socket 939! Ruinning at a blistering 2.8 GHz, it has massive 1MB of Cache and also an unlocked multiplier. It is targeted at enthusiasts and priced accordingly. These days the CPU is rare and in demand, but is it worth getting for your Retro Gaming PC?

 
I had an fx51 back in the day. I was too broke to afford it at first, but got the 940 motherboard, Asus sk8n, and an opteron 140, which was terribly slow even compared to Athlons of the era. But then I got the fx51 which was a nice jump in performance. Ocing sucked though, it was pretty much maxed out from the factory.
 
Back in the day I had an FX-57 on an Asus A8NSLI Premium and 2 GB memory. That was the most amount of money I had ever spent on a CPU ($811). It was a good machine and definitely fast, at least until the Core2Duo E6850 came out and destroyed it in terms of performance. A few years ago I pulled the FX-57 system out of storage and played around with it for fun. The single core was a problem. I ended up buying an FX-60 on eBay for a good (cheap) price and bumped the RAM to 4 GB and system usability (Windows 7 Pro 64bit I think) was better due to the dual cores even though they are clocked slower.
 
Good CPU but a major waste of money.
I had a 3700+ Sandy that could OC within spitting distance of that chip for $300 and some change during that time.
 
Oh shit, I had one of these and an FX-55. The latter oc'ed better than it's bigger brother.
 
I always wanted an FX or Opteron back in the day but couldn't afford them at the time so just had the regular Athlon 64's. Those were some good times.
 
Single-core processors kind of sucked, even back then. It's crazy to not even have a 2nd core. On a single-core CPU, literally every single other task on your computer is detracting from your gaming performance. It could probably run Windows 11, but both Windows 10 and 11 have tons of stuff running in the background because they basically assume that everyone has 4+ cores these days, or at the very very least 2c/4t. To be honest, i'd take a Pentium D (basically a dual-core Pentium 4) over an FX-57. That's actually close to what I had back then (dual Pentium 4-based Xeons), and even back then it was really nice to have that 2nd CPU.
 
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OPTERON 165 for best bang for the buck, except for a few of those x2's with 1mb l2 cache per core. 3800x2 was plenty as well, no point in the higher freqs if you OC.

still have my DFI boards and a couple asus
 
They are all over priced. Found that out when I thought I would MAX out my AsRock 939 dual for fun. NOPE!
But it is the king of single core, which represents a LONG history of what was PC gaming so it depends what part of PC history you covet the most. Apparently based on price many others got in long ago :D
 
I'll see if I can dig up any screenshots, my 3800x2 had a weird stepping - LLB9E or something. Would do 3.2ghz on water, 3.4ghz peltier. Opty was hard to get 3.2, 3.1 was the voltage wall. Still that single core opteron/fx-5700 can clock really high, probably 3.6+
 
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I lusted after the FX-57 back in the day, but had no chance in hell of attaining one at my wages at the time. It's just as well, as a couple years later I'd get an Athlon 64 X2 on AM2. I kinda regret selling off that MSI SLI motherboard and the X2 5600+ 2MB Windsor core in it. I never got to try SLI in it, either... Ah, well...

I could get one, however the fact that I have an Intel Core 2 Duo E8600 *and* a QX9650 kinda make the need for buying one immediately moot (e.g. unnecessary) more than anything. These are both much, much faster parts and have SSE4 which is useful for doing anything remotely modern with them (e.g. web browsing). And I already have motherboards for them. Can't say that for AM2, sadly.
 
I should add that having access to "fast" 775 CPUs isn't the point of this thread. If I could get one that didn't cost an arm and a leg I would in a heartbeat provided I found a good motherboard. That said I rather get it's dual core cousin, the X2 5600+ (Windsor). It's literally twice as fast. Heh.
 
Nebulous said:
Oh shit, I had one of these and an FX-55. The latter oc'ed better than it's bigger brother.
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Had a 53 and LOVED steamrolling P4 builds in Sandra / 3DMark / Aquamark with my 9700 at the time. Didn't OC worth crap IIRC, but it sure was fun. One was a demi god amongst plebeians with that kind of [H]ardware in those ages.

First and only 1k CPU i'll ever buy though. Still recall the ram too - a 1gb kit of fancy pants Corsair XMS3200 stuff with the black heatspreader which cost like 400 at the time.
 
atp1916 said:
Had a 53 and LOVED steamrolling P4 builds in Sandra / 3DMark / Aquamark with my 9700 at the time. Didn't OC worth crap IIRC, but it sure was fun. One was a demi god amongst plebeians with that kind of [H]ardware in those ages.

First and only 1k CPU i'll ever buy though. Still recall the ram too - a 1gb kit of fancy pants Corsair XMS3200 stuff with the black heatspreader which cost like 400 at the time.
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Samsung TCCD no doubt!
 
I jumped straight from my Athlon64 3200+ to a Core 2 Quad Q6600. What a massive performance improvement that was.
The 3200+ lived in a cardboard motherboard box running Plex for a while before I finally tossed it.
 
Sherman, set the wayback machine to 2004

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I feel like that setup should be more performant. I guess that time catches up to everything eventually.
 
Overclocking those chips was a little different. When you hit the wall, it was a literal wall. Voltage could be low, chip could be cool.. but not gonna budge any further.
 
My first and only AMD chip was a Athlon FX-60 back in 2006. It was the fastest chip at the time. It was a little over $1K during it's release. I used it for over a year before selling it and going back to Intel.
 
First computer I built with my Army basic training/AIT money was an Athlon 64 4000+ ($700 CPU at the time - stupid and I'll never do that again, lol), which was slotted right below the $1000 FX-55 at the time (FX-57 wasn't out yet). I later upgraded it to an FX-55 when the X2s were out for super cheap at the time, which was dumb really since it only got me an extra 200 MHz I think.

I still have the Athlon 4000+ in my drawer here, and my bro has the FX-55 in a desktop I gave to him a long time ago and he was actually still using it on Windows 7 up until a few months ago, lol. Of course it is painfully slow, but I thought it was cool to see the first 64-bit CPU get used to its full potential for several years on a 64-bit OS at least for several years since it launched way before any usable version of 64-bit Windows was available with Vista (I remember running 64-bit RCs of XP for a while though on a seperate partition just to play around with it, but most games wouldn't run well on it).

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rhkcommander959 said:
OPTERON 165 for best bang for the buck, except for a few of those x2's with 1mb l2 cache per core. 3800x2 was plenty as well, no point in the higher freqs if you OC.

still have my DFI boards and a couple asus
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Still have my 165 and board, I have thought about getting it out and installing something on it but I always put it off. Was a great system when using it though.
 
DooLocsta said:
Still have my 165 and board, I have thought about getting it out and installing something on it but I always put it off. Was a great system when using it though.
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This thread inspired me to dig my stuff back out. After the house fire it looks like ServPro killed my 4x512 crucial ballistix tracers ddr-500. Those sticks were so nice too! Don't trust those people to take care of anything you care about.

Looks like the OCZ coppers are OK though so far: 4x1gb. My 165 and 3800x2 look dead, but I found a newer 4200x2 I salvaged from another PC and already delidded that works.

DFI CFX3200 survived. Not sure what to use it for nowadays but itching to boot it up for something. Maybe a NAS/DNS server? Don't really need it for legacy games.

Haven't tried the asus a8nsli and 4x2gb since, but 8-16gb makes it a fairly usable system, aside from the x64 missing some instruction sets unfortunately. I know a couple of people have gotten 4x4GB to work, only on the a8n mobos though.
 
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rhkcommander959 said:
This thread inspired me to dig my stuff back out. After the house fire it looks like servpro killed my 4x512 crucial ballistix tracers ddr-500. Those sticks were so nice too!

Looks like the OCZ coppers are OK though so far: 4x1gb. My 165 and 3800x2 look dead, but I found a newer 4200x2 I salvaged from another PC and already delidded that works.

DFI CFX3200 survived. Not sure what to use it for nowadays but itching to boot it up for something. Maybe a NAS/DNS server? Don't really need it for legacy games.

Haven't tried the asus a8nsli and 4x2gb since, but 8-16gb makes it a fairly usable system, aside from the x64 missing some instruction sets unfortunately. I know a couple of people have gotten 4x4GB to work, only on the a8n mobos though.
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Sorry to hear about the fire. Hopefully your family wasn’t impacted too much!
 
For some reason I can't escape the box for my a8nsli board. It's long gone but every time that I happen across it I'll forget for a second and want to put it together.
 
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