Installation

Installation of the AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+ processor was very easy to do, the processor itself was already set on the motherboard when I started, all that was left to me was to install a new heatsink, place the memory on the board and then connect up the hard drive and the DVD-RW drive. This took a short amount of time thanks to the excellent Antec case we were using that gave us a good amount of space to work with. Installation was easy, we installed Windows Vista, this was via MSDN so it was all just one quick install, the installation itself was very fast indeed, I was stunned by how quickly Windows Vista installed. Windows straight away detected that we were using a Dual-Core processor (checked via Task Manager), but we went ahead and installed AMD's latest driver to make sure everything would run as well as possible.

We also made sure we had the latest motherboard update so that the processor was detected and run in the way it was designed to.

For most of our benchmarks, unless noted, we are not using the cool and quiet software that AMD provide. This was simply because it can sometimes hamper some of the hard core tests that we run, but don't get us wrong, its well worth installing for general end-users.

Here is a full run down of the latest AMD Athlon 64 AM 2 based processorts.