AMD Phenom II X2 550 BE & Athlon II X2 250 Processors

Product Summary & Final Conclusions:

Both the Phenom II X2 550 & Athlon II 250 seem very capable dual core chips. Intel has had dual core 45nm processors out for a long time but even those have always held a price premium. Hopefully as we see more of AMD's dual core 45nm chips trickle out Intel will step up their game and drop prices. Maybe Intel will will also enable more features on their Pentium Dual-Core chips to match what AMD is offering.

I am so glad AMD decided to keep the Athlon name going, it holds a lot of nostalgia for many enthusiasts. I hope they continue to use it for many years to come.

With only $15 price difference, it's a tough call on which processor to get. The Phenom II does yield a performance advantage thanks to it's whopping 6MB L3 cache, but the Athlon II does use less power. My personal choice from the pair... The Phenom II X2 550. I think the extra $15 is more than worth the bump in performance, and it's unlocked so overclocking is much easier. If the price gap was wider, then I think more people might have be swayed to the Athlon II if they were on a strict budget.

One thing I did not mention before but I feel is somewhat noteworthy. I used a Gigabyte MA770T-UD3P AM3 motherboard for these two new chips, but the cost of that board was *only* $85. That's an extremely reasonable price for the features and performance, and it pairs well with the price of these chips. You could buy a CPU, Motherboard, and RAM for less than the cost of just a Phenom II X4 955 BE processor!

If you have a little more money to spend, AMD's X3 720 Black Edition is a very nice processor worth considering. The X3 720 gives a reasonable boost in SMP performance over dual core chips, but still comes in priced well below quad core processors.