AMD Phenom II X2 560 BE & Athlon II X4 645 Review - PAGE 1

AMD has been very competitive lately when it comes to affordable processors, where its rival Intel still sells the few years-old Core 2 architecture and a bit of the Nehalem-based one, with a few scaled-down dies. Today's AMD CPU launch further underlines the awesome bang-for-the-buck one can get through AMD's offerings.

The Phenom II X2 555 Black Edition, which was recently the victim of price cuts, is dethroned as the flagship dual-core by the X2 560, which comes in 100Mhz faster -- for the same price.

The Athlon II lineup gets a bit more with the X4 645, the X3 445 and the X2 260, although the last two will not be covered in this article. As with the Phenom II, the processors previously retailing at the price points of the new ones have underwent a price cut.

Specifications

Pricing

These new offerings and price cuts are all summarized in the following table. The continuation of the table in the higher-end spectrum of the market can be found in the Phenom II X4 970 and X6 1075T article.

It is clear that AMD still has the bang-for-the-buck advantage. Below the $150 mark, the chipmaker offers six different quad-cores, whereas Intel has none. Below $100, there is really no reason to grab a processor based on the Core 2 architecture; AMD offers higher frequencies and more cores for cheaper in most cases.

The processor price is not the only factor, though. The motherboard cost is as important. As of now, an AM3 motherboard can be had for as low as $40, whereas an Intel socket 1156 one runs for $60. The Intel socket 775 CPUs get the lowest priced motherboards starting at  $34, altough $6 is really not enough to warrant them over the Athlon II lineup.