AMD Athlon II X4 640 3.0GHz Quad Core Processor Review

[Apoptosis]

The AMD Athlon II X4 640 is the fastest quad-core processor in the Athlon II series with its overall clock frequency of 3.0GHz. With a street price of $122 and just a 100MHz boost over its predecessor is the Athlon II X4 640 worth it? Read on to see how it performs in the benchmarks and to see how it handles being overclocked on our AMD 890GX test system.

Despite being aimed at a more budget minded crowd, the AMD Athlon II X4 640 performs like a champ. Pair it with a system board like the ASRock 890GX Extreme3 that we used today and you have the base for a solid gaming or multi-media system. Not bad, considering the system would support dual-monitors, Blu-Ray playback, GPGPU applications like stream and most importantly it would be ready for Windows 7.

Article Title: AMD Athlon II X4 640 3.0GHz Quad Core Processor Review
Article URL: http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1297/1/
Pricing At Time of Print: $122

[skier]

it looks like all these Athlon X4s can only get an ~800MHz overclock from stock on conventional cooling:
620: 2.6 > 3.4
635: 2.9 > 3.7
640: 3.0 > 3.8

them multi's are a paaaiin

[Major_A]

According to a rival reviewer site, cough*Tom's*cough, they were able to unlock the extra 2 cores on their processor. Any luck in this department?

[skier]

According to a rival reviewer site, cough*Tom's*cough, they were able to unlock the extra 2 cores on their processor. Any luck in this department?

last i knew the athlon series can't be unlocked, the duals are native duals and the quads are native quads...only the phenom II's have disabled cores

[XstollieX]

According to a rival reviewer site, cough*Tom's*cough, they were able to unlock the extra 2 cores on their processor. Any luck in this department?

Umm...This is a quad core already, are they saying they made it a 6 core, just checked over there and they were using a phenom ii 960t. This is an Athlon II X4 640 which is based on the propus core

[imsochobo]

From what i know.

Amd Phenom II 940/920 was just those two mostly.

945 and 925 became X3 720 710, that became Athlon II's
Then we got improved ones, 955 965, and now the six cores.
As far as i know, there is only ONE cpu die manufactured at a given time, please correct me if i'm wrong, i know Athlon II's based on 955 have L3 cache there, disabled though, X3 athlon II's have the cache and the 4th core.

New quads will have 6 cores natively (thuban) and then disabled.
Theese new 6 cores got High metal K thingy, so thats the reason for 3.2 ghz 125 Watt hexacore madness on 45nm, and we will most likely see athlon II's based on this aswell :D

Alltho, propus is propus, it isnt a 6 core natively.

Zosma is Phenom II, meet the new quadcore "die" zosma.

i may have written this all to complicated, and with loads of nonsense, neverthe less, amd's motto:

One die to rule them all, meet Thuban.
Athlon II X2
Athlon II X3
Athlon II X4
Phenom II X2
Phenom II X3
Phenom II X4
Phenom II X6

[Apoptosis]

AMD canceled retail Thuban based Phenom II X4 processors today for the retail market - http://legitreviews.com/news/8025/

Bummer if you ask me. If you want one you'll have to buy a pre-build OEM system which makes it no longer a viable option for those that want a bargain chip they can unlock. I knew it was too good to be true!

[djpinc19]

amd now thinks that unlocking cores is "cheating" as opposed to "bargain"?

*sad face*

[Major_A]

Gotcha. Well that's dumb on AMD's part. They could clearly use the possibility of unlocking cores to their advantage. If Joe Buyer wants to buy the better product it's Intel, if he wants a cheaper alternative that may contain a hidden surprise then it's AMD. I guess their video card division is making up for the losses in their CPU division at this point.

[iseeman]

Nice review man..I want the review of 45 watt amd quad core

[Archer_tR]

Good job with the review. I like to see other people taking these CPUs to ~3.8.

As to the unlocking. Early on there were some that were Deneb core that had the L3 locked but no extra cores. Also the AthlonII X2 has 1M L2 per core and therefore is a different FAB.