AMD Quad FX 4x4 brings multi-tasking alive

AMD HAS TALKED a lot about multitasking. Good use of dual cores means your system is going to be humming when you work with it and it might easily do decoding in the background while you play a game.

On our current single-core system and I can tell you that I have seven doc files open, a mail client, one Windows Explorer, a few Firefox windows, nine with tabs inside to be precise, and two Adobe Acrobats - and it can get even worse than that.

Once I start a HD Video or Avivo running on this machine, all the applications become unresponsive, as the encoding takes 100 percent of my single-core Pentium M based machine.

If you do the same thing with a dual core, the system will be much more responsive.

That is the whole point going for quad-core. Many Kentsfield reviews concluded that the X6800 ends up faster in many cases due its higher clock. But the crucial difference will come with multi tasking or Mega tasking, as AMD wants to call it now.

We had some time with a 4x4 system to see what happens when you try to do video editing, ray tracing, a HD Video decoding on one screen and a rendering at the same time on another.

Before we get to performance, we have to say that Quad FX as a brand is a huge surprise. AMD's marketing decided to use Nvidia's two least successful brands ever - Quad SLI and Geforce FX. Well, don't let us start about AMD's ability to come up with the right brand name, it would take a while.

AMD hit the right price with the Athlon FX74 as we mention here or actually two of these CPUs -clocked at 3GHz - cost $999 and might end up even cheaper in etail. This is the price that will shake the Kentsfiend's crown and will make people consider really hard. We said before, the board will cost around $300 and it will first be available for system builders and will later find its way to etail as well. Two FX74 CPUs and the board end up at $1300, while Kentsfield QX6700 Quad core with Nvidia Nforce 680 motherboard ends up at $1400, as we noted.

Our early US bird Charlie wrote a lot about the system and you can check the pricing and details here and there is even more to come from him.

It is not easy to prove the point of 4x4 and unveil its real Platformance. You need to do some heavy multitasking and as we just had limited time for you we will tell you about our first experience and how the system worked in heavy multitasking. The numbers come soon - at some point next week - when we get more time with the Quad FX system.

Quad FX, Athlon 74 dual SLI 4GB machine

Benchmarketing
AMD's 4x4 Quad FX system included:
Asus L1N64-SLI Nforce 680a dual core motherboard
2x Athlon FX 74 3000 MHz 90 nanometre
4x1024 MB DDR2 Corsair CM2X1024x85005D memory
2x Western Digital Raptor WD1500ADFD in Raid 0 hard drives
2x AMD reference coolers
1KW PSU a noisy edition
2x Geforce 7900 GTX cards in SLI

Quad FX, Athlon 74 dual 7900 SLI, Corsair 4GB, dual Raptor, Asus dual board inside

Until we get to run the usual benchmarks, we can let you know what this system feels like. It really has some hidden platformance under the hood. To unleash it you need some heavy multitasking scenarios.

You can run Sony Video editing 7 and render a video with a huge number of audio and video sequences, do the 3D raytracing with Cinema 4D and render with all four cores while zipping up the Quake 4 1.3 patch. The best thing is that the system will stay responsive. We tried it and we were amazed how we could open up Windows Bxplorer or a browser without any wait. This is what this system is all about.

The second scenario included Video Editing with DrDivX together with Video Encoding in Windows Media Encoder 9 and we ran the Battlefield 2 at the same time. We didn't have any hiccoughs in the games and two video files were decoding at all times. This is just amazing as you can run some serious stuff in the background and play a full-on game.

The heaviest scenario included Video encoding in Dr DivX, Video Encoding in Windows Media Encoder 9, Video editing and encoding in Sony Vegas 7 editing program, ray tracing with Cinebench and runnning a file compression at the same time with Winzip 11. If I'd seen it on a presentation it would make me a super-sceptic but I managed it with my own bare hands. Even with these five heavy tasks running, you would still be able to open the mail and browse the internet. I know you cannot do that with a single core and even dual-cores would be overloaded with it.

In Short
We still owe you a full-scale review but that will come when we spend more time, as we want to give this machine a ride. From what we've seen, everyone who has an FX60, or 62 will want one of the 4x4, Quad FX machines. They have the platformance.

If you play only games it won't make much difference from a dual core FX 60 or 62. However, if you play two instances of the same game, render a picture and chat with your friends, or render an image, resize a few hundred pictures and upload them to your site, editing a video for youtube while playing the MMORPG game and still want to have a responsive system I cannot think of a better system than this. I think multitasking is simply getting under our skin.

We will try to run these tasks on dual cores and even Intel's Quad core if we get a hold of one and to try to put the theory in numbers but from what I seen Quad FX with two Athlon FX 74 is a real beast.

The only shame is that father of multitasking Napoleon Bonaparte is not here to see this machine. He would certainly want to buy one. ?