AMD Athlon II X2 250 and Phenom II X2 550 Processors
Today, AMD is announcing not one, but two new exciting 45nm dual-cores! First, they are introducing the first-ever Athlon II processor. To top that off they are releasing a Phenom II X2 550 Processor that runs at 3.1GHz with a massive 6MB of shared L3 cache. Read on to see what these processors are all about!
We increased the multiplier from x15.5 all the way up to x19 and then increased the bus speed from 200MHz to 215MHz with little effort. This was enough to break the 4GHz mark as the overall clock frequency was 4.09Ghz, which is great. This is an overclock of 985MHz, which is roughly what we saw on the Athlon II X2 250 processor. It seems both of these processors love to be overclocked at we were able to get nearly 1GHz overclocks with air cooling! Not bad for $87 and $102 processors if you ask us.
Looks nice, one could build one heck of a htpc on the cheap with these puppies. Heck, even a cheap gaming rig would be not too shabby with e OCs these can pull off...
why are the phenoms always mistreated.The I-series get 1600DDR3,the phenoms 800DDR2.
The new phenoms have a DDR3 controller.The I-series get 6Gigs the phenoms only 4Gigs.
I only want a non-biased review.No cheats.
It's not cheating... With the charts pushing 30 processors it's impossible to keep things 100% fair... 6GB versus 4GB in the applications we benchmark with don't matter. Our games, excel benchmarks and movie editing tests don't use all 4GB, so the extra 2GB that the Core I7 platforms isn't being used.
The Phenom II's were run at 1066MHz and not 800MHz, which does make a performance difference.