Although we've tested most processors from Intel, no due attention has been paid to a lot of CPUs from AMD. Today we shall make amends and examine as many as five affordable processors from this company.

Testbeds

Today's lineup to test will include Athlon II X2 265 and X3 455, Phenom II X2 565, X4 840 and X4 925. All except the last two represent evolutionary changes of respective lineups — they just have higher clock rate than previous models. Just the opposite, Phenom II X4 925 is one of the oldest in its series. As you may remember, AMD Phenom II X4 920 was one of the first in the lineup, and X4 925 announced a few months later only differs by having DDR3 support (and support for AMD's updated platform as well). These processors are still available in stores — for a rather attractive price for a quad-core processor.

It will also be interesting to compare Phenom II X4 925 with Phenom II X4 840. The latter doesn't belong to the old 800 series (that only offered smaller L3 cache compared to the 900 series), but is based on the same die as Athlon II X4. In fact, it should've been named "Athlon II X4 650," because its only difference from Athlon II X4 645 is the clock rate which is 100 MHz higher. But AMD decided otherwise, so let's see if that was justified.

For comparison we chose Athlon II X4 645 (for reasons mentioned above) and Phenom II X3 740. The latter is leaving the market, but it was rather popular in its days, so comparing it to Phenom II X4 840 and Phenom II X4 925 will be interesting.

And we also selected two Intel processors. Firstly, Core i3-2100, an obvious competitor. It's a bit more expensive, but also fast and promising in terms of platform. Secondly, Pentium E6800, an old, affordable model that still sells and competes directly with Athlon II X2, Athlon II X3 and even Phenom II X4 920.

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