AMD Releases $99 Quad Core CPU

In my daily "what tech should I buy" travels I came across this yesterday.

AMD effectively knocked 40% off the value of Intel's low end quad-core CPUs. The Athlon II X4 620 manages to, at $99, perform close enough to the Core 2 Quad Q8200 that the latter simply doesn't make any sense. Add another hundred dollars and you'll get a Core i5 750 (or less will get you into a Phenom II X4 945/955), but if you're on a strict budget you can't beat the 620.

The 630 I'm less excited about simply because it commands a 22% price premium. What the 620 has going for it is its sub-$100 entry price; start going much above that then you might as well be looking at a Phenom II X3.

Considering you can get an AM3 Motherboard that supports DD3 RAM for $54, that's a cheap (but still decently performing) quad system for around $160!

I'll still probably go i5, but this is good news for pricing across the board getting lower.

Holy crap, that's awesome! I've got to see if some of our local suppliers can get us that pricing. I smell an awesome system special.

And just as I start pricing parts. How nice of them.

This is pretty good news for everyone, really. Quad-cores becoming standard even at the entry budget level is probably going to mean practically every application under the sun will be written with that it mind, and thus it'll be more effectively used. Mind you, we've also been using 64-bit CPUs for ages as well and 64-bit apps and Windows are still not standard, so I might be overly optimistic.

Excellent!

I'm still going i7, but like kuddles said, it changes industry standard.

Nice to hear some good news coming out of AMD. That's really a fantastic amount of computing for the money.

AMD finally got back in the game with the Phenom II line. I recently took advantage of a killer NewEgg combo sale to replace my old overclocked E4300 with a Phenom II X4 940 Black Edition.

It's great to see AMD isn't taking the Core i5 assault lying down. We're finally getting back to good ol' Intel/AMD knife fights.

*Legion* wrote:

AMD finally got back in the game with the Phenom II line. I recently took advantage of a killer NewEgg combo sale to replace my old overclocked E4300 with a Phenom II X4 940 Black Edition.

It's great to see AMD isn't taking the Core i5 assault lying down. We're finally getting back to good ol' Intel/AMD knife fights.

Don't forget there is a referee on the field this time. Not sure how a referee would work in a knife fight though

Awesome. I'm looking at revamping my HTPC so hopefully they make a good mini ATX board that supports this.

That'd be a real nice system. We're generally not that CPU-constrained anyway in gaming, so that'd be a pretty darn good setup on the cheap.

LiquidMantis wrote:

Awesome. I'm looking at revamping my HTPC so hopefully they make a good mini ATX board that supports this.

Yea, this is perfect for an HTPC

Is this a good time to ask for a recommended built for a budget gaming system?

No really, these aren't good for gaming, you'd be better of with an X2 550