General Performance Notes:

With the exception of our Unbuffered Memory and DVD Encoding benchmarks, the dual core Athlon 64 X2 was slower than the Athlon 64 FX-55. The Toledo-based Athlon 64 X2 4800+ has an improved memory controller, SSE3 instructions, and improved multimedia performance, which explains why the dual core CPU is faster than its single core cousins in these single threaded benchmarks.