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It's really amazing how AMD manages to launch great performance processors for really cheap these days. The new Propus core is even better at it; the transistor count is down to approximately 300 million compared to the 758 million of the Deneb core used to manufacture the Phenom IIs. This translates into a 169mm² die instead of a 258mm² one. This quad-core die first appeared at the heart of the Athlon II X4 6xx series a month ago.

AMD is now using the same technique as they do on the Phenom II series; disabling faulty cores and selling the chips at a much lower price tag. This yields the Athlon II X3 series, the first tri-core processor that does not feature L3 cache. How will this affect its performance? That is what we will investigate later, but for now, let's look at the processor pricing to see where this newborn stands. I decided to do an extensive price comparison from $60 to $200 to see what are the best options. In green are AMD's offerings, and in blue are Intel's ones. I boxed some processors together where I thought it would make sense to compare them, price and performance wise, and I also put in bold the three processors I am going to compare in this article.

I am sure you can figure out what are the best options in a given price range. In my opinion, the only time I would consider blue is in the top box, where an i5-750 can be had for $200. Notice also how Intel has no offering ranging between $95 and $119. Furthermore, AMD offers for approximately the same price a higher core count or a higher frequency, or both. Some of its processors also compete with much higher priced ones too. For example, the Athlon II X2 250 priced at $76 gives the $120 E7500 a run for its money. The Athlon II X3 435 should also do pretty well against the almost twice expensive E8400, as long as the application supports more than two threads.

Specifications

Let's now take a look at our test setup.