AMD Athlon II X4 640 Socket AM3 Processor

Product Summary & Final Conclusions:

As I stated in my opening paragraph, these CPUs for the most part are simply speed bumps in existing product lines along with using the latest C3 revision silicon. These new processors should replace existing models at the same price point, thus pushing down the cost of all existing models.

From an upgrade perspective, AMD still reigns supreme by having all their Athlon II & Phenom II AM3 processors backwards compatible with the AM2/AM2+ socket.

When you put the AMD Athlon II X4 640 and Phenom II X4 945 side by side, both running at 3.0 GHz, it's clear there is a slight performance advantage to the Phenom II line with the 6MB of L3 cache (which is one reason the 945 costs more). Even with the existing overlap between the two lines, one still has to realize that the 640 is the top of the Athlon II line, while the 925/940/945 processors are at the bottom of the Phenom II line.

Comparing Intel products, the cheapest quad-core (which we included in this review) is the Core 2 Quad Q8300, costing ~$150. The cheapest quad-core i5 processor is ~$200, which for that cost you can get a Phenom II X6 1055T.

If you would like to see some extra comparative numbers with X3 & X2 processors, you can check out some earlier reviews on the Athlon II X4 635 & X3 440 processors or Athlon II X3 435 & X2 240e processors. Please remember that those reviews used different benchmark programs and hardware setups, so don't try to compare them to numbers in this review.