Intel may hold the performance crown when it comes to high end processors, but that’s not to say that the AMD range should be forgotten. AMD actually have some very well priced CPUs, especially at the lower price points. From around £55 online in the UK this X3 is the lowest priced triple core CPU available.
Introduction: AMD Athlon II X3 425 CPU
After a few years since the release of the first commercially available dual core processors for home PCs, we now have a situation where the software developers have well and truely embraced multicore processing. Certainly gaming and PC intensive tasks such as video editing and distributed computing benefit from having muliple cores available.
It is well known that for pure performance the Intel chips are the cream of the crop and if you have the money to invest in an i5 or i7 quad core setup then that is currently the best bet. But not everyone has that sort of cash available, the lowest i5 quad core in the Intel range is the i5-750 and it will set you back £160 of your hard earned cash. If you don’t mind investing in an old platform you could choose the 775 socket Q8300 but then you’ll still be paying £115 and you could buy two X3s for that price.
Sure the X3 425 Triple can’t compete with the Intel Q8300 Quad on performance but then there isn’t an Intel triple core product so in terms of comparible pricing the X3 finds itself up against the likes of the Intel Pentium E5300, again on the old Intel 775 socket platform and only a dual core.
For those who aren’t familiar with the current AMD range of processors, this is an AM3 socket CPU. This means that it can be used on either an AM3 motherboard or an AM2+ motherboard as long as the BIOS supports it. The current AM3 CPUs have an onboard memory controller that can function with either DDR2 or DDR3 memory, so you can pair this CPU with DDR2 memory on an AM2+ motherboard or DDR3 memory on an AM3 motherboard.
AMD Athlon II X3 425 Specs:
- £56.98
- UK Price (at time of writing @ Novatech)
- 3
- No. of Physical Cores :
- 45 nm
- Process Size :
- 2.7 GHz
- Clock Speed :
- 1.5 Mb
- L2 Cache :
- AM2+ or AM3
- Socket :
- DDR2 or DDR3
- Memory Compatibility :
Intel Pentium E5300:
- £50.76
- UK Price (at time of writing @ amazon.co.uk)
- 2
- No. of Physical Cores :
- 45 nm
- Process Size :
- 2.6 GHz
- Clock Speed :
- 2 Mb
- L2 Cache :
- 775
- Socket :
- DDR2
- Memory Compatibility :
The X3 425 has a default clock speed of 2.7GHz which comes from having a 200 base clock and a 13.5x multiplier. The chip is based on the Rana architecture and as such is a 45 nm chip with a thermal design of 95W. The L2 cache on these chips is 1.5 Mb total which is a bit on the low side, especially considering the E5300 has 2 Mb and it only needs to share this between two cores.
Add A Comment