As the performance war heats up, with the Core i7 lowering TDP and raising the score bar in many benchmarks, one may think that AMD may just have given up. Long gone are the days when the Athlon 64 was the king of processors, when the underdog held the title. Intel has ushered in a new era of computing recently, and things may look bleak, but only when you forget that the price war is at its fiercest. While the Core i7 may be the reigning champ of the high end of computing, with great scores in video editing and synthetic benchmarks, AMD has been closing the gap at the middle and lower budget points, offering outstanding value for the mainstream user. In fact, this “gap” may look like a revolving door, and it is. Intel and AMD have been trading blows in the non-premium CPU war, and AMD has far from given up the battle.
With a plethora of new CPUs targeting this price point, AMD has renewed the fight, with vigor. With lower TDP on the Phenom II 965 coming soon, and new processors aplenty, it's clear that interesting things lie ahead. The AMD Athlon II X2 240e, with a very low TDP of 45w, and the Athlon II X3 435, the first Athlon triple core, a triple core with plenty of power for the majority of users, are two of the new contenders in this conflict. These units, both available for less than $100 USD, are aggressively priced, and are capable performers.
Will the lack of an L3 cache like their Phenom brothers hurt their performance? Sure, they're cheap, but exactly how well do they perform? And, the most burning question, how well do they overclock? Let's find out!
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