AMD Athlon II X4 645 Pro Reviews

To sum it all up, AMDs quad-core 3.1GHz Athlon II X4 645 is a good mainstream CPU at $122 CDN ($122 USD, £61 GBP), especially for those looking at heavily multi-threaded workloads on a budget. It is by no mean the fastest quad-core offering in the AMD stable and its lack of L3 cache does put the CPU at a disadvantage in certain benchmarks, as you've seen. On the whole, this mainstream processor does offer a compelling blend of overall system performance particularly when paired with AMD's 890GX motherboard that's hard to beat for everyday general computing requirements.

A four-core chip for chump change is an attractive idea. The Athlon II X4 645 isn't quite as cheap as we'd like, but it's still extremely affordable and delivers excellent threading performance for the money. That's thanks in no small part to its healthy 3.1GHz clockspeed.

If you are a gamer on a budget any Athlon II X4 will do fine, even when games are sadly not optimzied on the AMD platform. A potent graphics-card will always be more crucial for good framerates then a faster CPU. The overclocking potential has not increased with the faster parts but speed is adequate. Everybody who needs more potential will go with the X6 line, everybody else does nothing wrong buying an AMD Athlon X4.

With a price of $ 122, fast clocked cores, strictly okay power consumption and backward compatibility to AM2+ sockets using DDR2 or DDR3 memory, it's really hard to find flaws in Athlon II X4 645. Even in its weakest segment, gaming performance, Athlon II X4 645 performed more than acceptable making up the lack of L3 cache with higher clocked cores. But I can't shake the feeling that AMD almost forced this fastest Athlon II X4 model to where it landed, and with just a little bit of luck, or should we say help from Intel. Although Intel can come up with an answer to Athlon II X4 645 quite easily, it chooses not to play AMD's aggressive pricing game and in doing so, it's making more than enough room on the market that AMD can exploit with processors such is Athlon II X4 645.

AMD's ADX445WFGMBOX retail kit is expected to be released with an MSRP of $122, which is an extremely low price as far as quad-core processors are concerned. It's also the same price that the Athlon-II X4-640 was released at. That being said, I think $122 for this processor is a great value. The only thing that concerns me here is that the Athlon-II X4-640 is now set to be reduced in price to just $99. Most of our testing showed that the 3% increase in clock speed for the X4-645 translates almost directly to a 3% increase in performance. Both processors are similar in overclocking ability and the Athlon-II X4-645 really brings nothing new to the table other than a slight increase in stock clock speed. My concern is that the Athlon-II X4-640 is now a better value than the X4-645.