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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Eeqmcsq - Monday, January 25, 2010 - link
I'm surprised AMD will release a 95W TDP X6. I hope the clock speed sacrifice isn't too bad on those.AmdInside - Monday, January 25, 2010 - link
Dumb question but none of these processors will work on older AM2 plus motherboards?Taft12 - Tuesday, January 26, 2010 - link
Pardon the yelling, but this is the only answer that matters:SEE THE SUPPORTED CPU LIST ON YOUR MOTHERBOARD'S SUPPORT PAGE
Many old boards don't get BIOS updates. Some do, but you won't know until you check.
nubie - Monday, January 25, 2010 - link
It all depends on the board and manufacturer bios support.If your motherboard is recent (within 1-2 years old), or has a bios update from the manufacturer, then it will work.
Apparently some older boards don't have room on the bios chip to support AM2+ or AM3 processors as well as maintain backwards compatibility, it is a shame.
(I probably just have the rare board that isn't upgradeable.)
nubie - Monday, January 25, 2010 - link
Oops, you said AM2+ , but you spelled out the plusAM2+ is guaranteed to support AM3 processors.
Rand - Monday, January 25, 2010 - link
I can't imagine why they wouldn't, their predecessors all did and there is nothing in the C3 stepping Phenom II's themselves that prevent it.AmdInside - Monday, January 25, 2010 - link
Well, I wasn't sure if these were AMD3 only or AM2/AM3 processors.Slaimus - Monday, January 25, 2010 - link
There are no such thing as AM3-only processors. AM3 processors work in AM3 and AM2+ boards.All AM3 motherboards are AM3-only, and will not work with AM2 processors.
Rand - Monday, January 25, 2010 - link
What is the stock VCore on the X4 910e?pattycake0147 - Monday, January 25, 2010 - link
The link referencing hardware C1E on page 1 is broken.