AND has introduced their new budget Athlon II X4 620 and 630 processors.  Several websites have already put out their reviews on these processors and they all seem to have very similar conclusion, that they are not the fastest quad-core chip around, but they seem to compete very well with all of the processors in its price range while being the cheapest.  

The higher clocked Athlon II X4 630 will have an initial MSRP of $122 while the Athlon II X4 620 will come in at just $99. This puts them in direct price competition with Intel’s high-end dual-cores, low-end quad-cores, and even their own Phenom II X3 triple-cores.

These processors will have the following specs:

Dual Mode Memory

AMD’s dual mode memory controller supports both a DDR2 and DDR3 Dual Channel memory controller on the single CPU.  This allows for a seamless upgrade path allowing users with current AM2+ motherboards to use the Phenom II and Athlon II processors in their current motherboards with DDR2 memory, while allowing upgrade path to DDR3 at a later date.

Cache

This is where Athlon II is different from the Phenom II line.  Athlon II has its L3 cache removed in order to save money on production costs, as well as to reduce its overall performance.

The one thing that the Athlon II does not lack is overclocking headroom.  Some of the results netted overclockability up to 3.9 GHz on air cooling.  I am sure even better numbers can be achieved with water cooling, and some extra BIOS and Memory fine tuning.  

Although these processors have their L3 cache removed, they do not seem to suffer much from the performance dip.  For general daily usage, the Athlon II X4 processors compared very well to their Phenom II siblings.  The only place where the lack of L3 cache was evident was with games like Crysis.  However, for a non-gamer, the Athlon II X4s should definitely be on the top of the list.  Even when it comes to the overclocking crowd, the price point and its ability to overclock very well may be a big hit.  

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