AMD's New Year Refresh: Athlon II X4 635, Phenom II X2 555, Athlon II X2 255 & Athlon II X3 440
by Anand Lal Shimpi on January 25, 2010 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Final Words
Admittedly it's not the most exciting of launches. Simple speed boosts never are. But that does not detract from the value that AMD is delivering here. The Athlon II X4 line continues to be unrivaled in terms of delivering multithreaded performance in an affordable package. The $99 Athlon II X4 630 and $119 Athlon II X4 635 are great values if you're doing a lot of video encoding or any other heavily threaded task. You may even be able to find some great deals on 620s now that they're priced out of the lineup.
The Athlon II X3 440 can be just as powerful of a sell, once again depending on your workload. Priced at $84 it's going to be better in well threaded workloads than the equivalently priced Intel dual-core. The Pentium G6950 sells for $99, runs at 2.8GHz and could potentially spoil AMD's fun here. Luckily for AMD, Intel disables HT on the Pentium G6950 and thus it's only a two core, two thread chip. We'll have to wait and see how that performs once we get a chip in house.
The new dual-core CPUs are competitive, but they don't dominate. The Phenom II X2 555 BE is priced too close to the Core i3 530 to make sense. The Athlon II X2 255 does well against the Pentium E6300 and has a much stronger upgrade path than anything that sits in the LGA-775 socket. Throughout 2010 Intel won't bring LGA-1156 into the sub-$80 price segment, so AMD has the ability to use Phenom II and Athlon II to compete with older Core 2 based designs there.
And there you have it. Things rarely change with a launch that's just a speed bump.
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SmCaudata - Monday, January 25, 2010 - link
It is very good to look at the CPU vs CPU cost for performance but look at the total cost. Comparing these chips isn't that fair really. I can go to Microcenter and pick up an x4 620 for $90 and get my choice of 2 motherboards from $20 - $60. Even without these package discounts the AMD motherboards are much cheaper. The cheapest Intel boards are dipping in the low $90s right now for the i3s and i5s. You do get a few added features with the H44/H57 boards but it is a big price difference in the end. I personally have owned intel for my last 3 builds but at the low end it isn't nearly as close of a competition as your article points out. Heck, even P45 boards are still in the $90 range for one with needed features.Penti - Tuesday, January 26, 2010 - link
BTW look at this deal, http://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboDealDetails.asp...">http://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboDealDetails.asp...It's not much. Sure you can get 785G boards for $42 after rebates and MIR. $138 USD total for 785G and X4 620. But the Intel is still a good platform for them money. Board comes down to $71 after rebates any how. I guess you can compare the $100 boards with AMDs $85-105 dollar 785G/790GX boards. You get quad-core, but a slower processor.
strikeback03 - Monday, January 25, 2010 - link
And you would really trust a $20 motherboard?formulav8 - Monday, January 25, 2010 - link
Yes I would and do. I've built many upon many computers and $20-$50 mobo's work very well. Its not like the older days. Manuf like ECS even make the higher end boards for the higher end names. I believe Abit is one of their customers.So yes a $20 mobo works just fine. Obviously don't expect all of the bells and such, but the bang for the buck systems is definitely on AMD's side.
They give me a nice profit margin. Which is always a good thing. :)
PS: Apart from my own desktop and my wifes desktop which both uses Intel chips, customer builds has been using AMD for quite awhile now do to the bang you get from them.
Jason
Penti - Tuesday, January 26, 2010 - link
Abit had their own manufacturing, now they are owned by contract manufacturer USI or Universal Scientific Industrial Co., Ltd.ECS is a contract manufacturer (ODM) like all the others but mostly makes low end stuff especially under their own brand. (ECS/PC Chips). And of course supplies the OEMs. I wouldn't rank them higher then any of the others.
Companies like EVGA, XFX and BFG are factory less and their products are produced (mostly) by Foxconn. They are of course also american companies so theres no surprise there.
kmmatney - Monday, January 25, 2010 - link
From a stability point of view, I've had better luck with cheaper motherboards, since they usually have very limited overclocking options. Cheaper boards also tend to run a little slower, but as i said I've always found them to be stable, since there is not much than can go wrong.medi01 - Monday, January 25, 2010 - link
Agreed, motherboard costs should be taken into account.StevoLincolnite - Monday, January 25, 2010 - link
Did you guys try and unlock the cores? I was a lucky sod that managed to get an Athlon 2 X4 620 to have all of it's cache unlocked, essentially turning it into a Phenom 2 X4 910 but at a much lower price.PCWizKid - Monday, January 25, 2010 - link
I unlocked all 4 cores on the Phenom II X4 555 BE , check out my review here http://tinyurl.com/phenomii555">http://tinyurl.com/phenomii555v12v12 - Friday, January 29, 2010 - link
Wow... I don't know how old you are, but that was an excellently narrated review. Very few, if any hang ups or awkward pauses; you seem to have a talent for that... could be worth something to you in the future buddy. All these tech-TV shows/websites need competent reviewers and such for shows like CES etc. Could have a future out there doing something unusually nice!As for the 555... WOW now that's a legendary sized unlock! Where have chips like these been lately, in AMDs line up? I haven't seen something like that from AMD since the L1-L2 bridge Pen/super-glue gap-able AXPs and unlocked mobile XP-Ms. That was quite a long time ago... haha.
Hope AMD comes with more than a few fancy OC tricks though... then again, Intel's pet project group will take notice of this very unusually easy unlock trick, and hopefully release a special batch of chips as retort. Gotta love CPU competition, esp when OC'ing potential comes into factor for the Manus... b/c really, they could completely lock up all these chips for no OC'ing period... so they do occasionally toss use nuggets.
...OC 4 Life.