AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+ < Conclusion >

Conclusion:

I would have loved to actually been able to run benchmarks on this processor in a true 64 bit environment. Believe me, it was tried and between freezes during benchmarks, incompatibility issues with drivers and Vista just not being all it’s cracked up to be, it was a nightmare not even worth showing.

If you are looking for performance out of the box and the AMD 6000+ wasn’t recommended, then whomever it was that gave you the advice was truly making a mistake. The 6000+ is less expensive than its Intel counterparts, has a higher clock speed right out of the box and performs within a margin of error in most benchmarks, even though it has half the L2 cache and only a FSB of 200 MHz, opposed to Intel's 266 and 333 MHz. So if you are an end user looking for performance and price, this should not be overlooked.

Edit: I need to retract the error of my ways. Front Side Bus (FSB) is a term that many enthusiasts use when speaking in terms of overclocking. AMD uses HyperTransport technology, which actually runs at 2000MHz. This is a Front Side Bus replacement, as referred to on the Extras page. What I was actually referring to is the overclocking starting point (BIOS), which is 200 times some multiplier. Unfortunatly, even when you are in the BIOS, this clock speed is still referred to FSB by many manufacturers.

As an enthusiast, the 6000+ does fall behind in its overclockability and did fall behind in most of our processor benchmarks. SiSandra would be the benchmark that stands out the most; multicore efficiency was not even half of what its competitors scored, and due to its lack of L2 cache, did cause it to falter in the Cache and Memory benchmark. Where did the 6000+ shine? I would have to say when it comes to gaming. I purposely used a video card that had less memory just to prove a point. The point being that most gamers play at resolutions of either 1024 x 768 or 1280 x 1024 and this is where a processor still has influence. As I mentioned in a comment earlier while benchmarking the other chips, with the 8800 GTS 320MB card frame rates dropped anywhere between 7 to 22 FPS in Far Cry, but those rates did drop in the others as well, with different varying FPS. So with a difference of 5 to 7 FPS less, would saving some pocket money be worth it if all you wanted to do is game?

So out of the box, the 6000+ is a choice that all should look at. Even enthusiasts don’t overclock all of their rigs, and I’m sure that your children, wife, girlfriend or Mom won’t recognize the difference.

Pros:

• Price
• Performance Out of Box
• Mildly Overclockable
• 3.0 GHz

Cons:

• Mildly Overclockable
• Multiplier Just About Maxed
• 2MB L2 Cache
• For an end user these wouldn't be cons, but for an enthusiast, they are worth a mention

source: http://www.overclockersclub.com/