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AMD Athlon II X3 microprocessor | ||||||||||||
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| CPU » K10 family » Athlon II X3 | ||||||||||||
Production parts Picture: gshv First reports of imminent release of energy efficient Athlon II X3 400e and 405e processors surfaced in early 2009. There were rumors they would be released in June 2009 together with other Athlon II microprocessors. In June 2009, AMD introduced a mixture of Phenom II X2, X3 and X4 CPUs, and only one microprocessor from Athlon II family - dual-core ADX250OCK23GQ (model 250). In the course of the next three months AMD introduced standard power dual- and quad-core Athlon II CPUs. At long last, energy-efficient Athlons were announced in October 2009. Although these processors appeared in OEM systems, they were very difficult to find in US retail and online stores. Even now, three months after official release, very few stores in US have these processors in stock.  Picture: gshv Model 405e is the fastest from low-power triple core Athlon II microprocessors. This processor runs at the same frequency and has the same Thermal Design Power as the fastest quad-core energy-efficient Athlon II X4 605e CPU. In applications, that heavily utilize all microprocessor cores, like image rendering, video or audio encoding, the 405e may be up to 25% - 30% slower than the 605e. In all other applications, including many games, performance of the 405e is comparable to model 605e. As of October 2009, the Athlon II X3 405e is priced nearly 40% cheaper than the quad-core 605e, which makes it a much better option for upgrade or new system in cases when low budget is as important as low power consumption and processor performance.  Picture: gshv Athlon II X3 family was the last Athlon II family launched in 2009 - dual-core Athlon II CPUs were announced in June 2009, quad-core Athlon II processors were introduced in September, and triple-core X3 family was released in October. One of the first triple core Athlon II microprocessors was Athlon II X3 425. The 425 is based on Rana core, which is similar to quad-core Propus core with one core disabled. It is possible to unlock the disabled core on this and other Athlon II X3 processors on some socket AM3 motherboards by switching "Advanced Clock Calibration" BIOS option to "Auto". We unlocked the forth core on Athlon II 425 CPU, that we tested, but the unlocked core turned out to be defective. When the forth core was enabled, BIOS reported processor as "AMD Athlon(tm) II X4 B25 Processor". We could boot the system into DOS, which uses only one core. The system couldn't be booted into OS that supports all 4 processors. An attempt to unlock the forth core on our Athlon II X3 435 failed completely - with the forth core enabled, the system could not even pass BIOS Power-On Self Test.  Picture: gshv The second Athlon II X3 processor, released in October 2009, is model 435 (part number ADX435WFK32GI). This processor is 200 MHz faster than model 425, which translates into 5% - 7% better performance. Like other Athlon II processors, model 435 doesn't have level 3 cache, and performs not as good as more expensive and powerful Phenom II X3 family. In pure numeric benchmarks the 435 beats Phenom II X3 720 - after all, the Athlon II X3 435 has 100 MHz higher core frequency. In memory-intensive applications the 425 is up to 15% slower than the 720. Not released yet |
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