![]() ![]() Stay tuned to STH as the plan is to purchase and test a Athlon II X2 250 Regor based chip and test it on this platform giving a straight comparison at 3.0GHz between dual, triple, and quad core Athlon II chips. The test configuration for this review is the same as in the AMD Althon II X4 Propus 3.0GHz review using unbuffered ECC DDR3 DIMMs and the Gigabyte 880GM-UD2H. $10-20 is generally not worth the risk especially on a $1,000+ home server. Frankly, the difference in price is generally in the $10-20 (USD) range, so I would suggest that if one requires full quad core performance, that one simply purchases the appropriate quad core part. My general concern is with unlocked cores with minor flaws that do not show up during initial testing, but show themselves in data errors later on in a server’s lifecycle. The risk of unlocking a core with a major dysfunction is relatively low as usually a severely deficient core will cause immediate problems. On one hand, a user may get an Athlon II X3 440 that is a perfectly fine Athlon II X4 640 that AMD decided to simply turn off a fully functional core. Like overclocking, I will not go over core unlocking in this review as I generally consider this to be a risky practice. Some users will purchase the Athlon II X3 chips and a motherboard capable of unlocking the disabled cores in the hope of saving a few dollars on the quad core parts. Since the Athlon II architecture has been covered in-depth already in the other reviews, this review will be mainly focused on the power consumption and performance of the Athlon II X3 at 3.1GHz versus the quad core variant at 3.0GHz (the 100Mhz difference is fairly negligible compared to the additional core in the X4 part).Īs a quick overview, the Athlon II X3 445 is more or less a Athlon II X4 640 with one core and its associated 512KB L2 cache disabled running at 100MHz faster (therefore it has three 3.1GHz cores and 1.5MB of L2 cache). STH has already reviewed the single core Sempron 140, the dual core Athlon II X2 260 Regor, and the quad core Athlon II X4 640 Propus so hopefully this helps fill in the performance picture between the dual and quad core offerings. Unlike Intel, AMD produces a full line of triple core processors including the AMD Athlon II X3 445 3.1GHz that will be reviewed here today. ![]()
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