Final Thoughts
There you have it. AMD’s Phenom X3 is certainly a very unique product. Priced at less than many of Intel’s dual-core offerings, the X3 lineup is sure to get the attention of the mainstream and budget conscious crowd. Starting at only $145 for the X3 8450, buyers can get quite a bit of processor for their money.
Intel’s Core2 processors are a very tough crowd to beat these days though, especially their latest 45nm models. Although the 45nm Core2 Duo often outperforms the Phenom X3 in older and single-threaded applications, the X3s posses a lot of untapped potential that will be useful in the future. As we’ve seen—the X3 scales very well in applications that can take advantage of multiple processing cores. Multi-threaded applications will become increasingly common moving forward, so the X3 is a good longer-term choice in that respect. Really, it comes down to fewer, faster cores, or more numerous, slower cores. When comparing the raw crunching power in some synthetic benchmarks, the X3 8750 and the E8400 are almost at par. The problem is finding real-world applications today that can take advantage of that extra horsepower.
I think the X3’s biggest adopters will be in the integrated graphics segment. AMD’s latest 780G chipset is the integrated platform to own today. The X3 complements it very nicely and the combination will definitely find its way into sub $500 PCs. It will be difficult to find an integrated platform from Intel that offers what the 780G and X3 do. I think that the X3 will be very popular among OEMs for this reason—the average consumer wants a capable system—not just a CPU.
We’d like to sincerely thank AMD for providing us with the X3 processor we used to make this review possible.
Articles RSS