AMD Athlon II X4 640 Pro Reviews

A new model of a CPU series is usually a pretty big deal, but six is phenomenal. Not only is AMD increasing the clock speed on these new models, but they are also keeping the top price points the same. So now you can get the new top-tier Athlon II X4, X3 or X2 for the price of the previous top-tier model. Nice. AMD is also dropping the prices on previously released models. That makes the 2.9GHz Athlon II X4 635 the new sub-$100 quad-core. Once again, it really seems like AMD is looking out for the budget-conscious consumer. After putting the Athlon II X4 640 through the paces, it is clear that the clock increase from previous models in the same series returns very predictable benchmarking results. With a little overclocking, the performance of the X4 640 is nothing to scoff at. With a suggested retail price of $122, this model is sure to find a home in many new builds. And if the $122 price is higher than you want, remember that the price of the previous Athlon II X4 leader, the 635, has now dropped to sub-$100 prices.

When you put the AMD Athlon II X4 640 and Phenom II X4 945 side by side, both running at 3.0 GHz, it's clear there is a slight performance advantage to the Phenom II line with the 6MB of L3 cache (which is one reason the 945 costs more). Even with the existing overlap between the two lines, one still has to realize that the 640 is the top of the Athlon II line, while the 925/940/945 processors are at the bottom of the Phenom II line.

The new Athlon II X4 640 performed relatively well, especially considering its affordable price point. Generally speaking, the Athlon II X4 640 processor was outpaced by Intel's latest dual-core, the Core i5-661, but keep in mind AMD's new offering is significantly less expensive. In both single- and multi-threaded tasks, the higher frequency of the 3.0GHz Athlon II X4 640 gives it an edge over the 2.9GHz Athlon II X4 635, but there were still a number of scenarios where Intel's older Penryn-based quad-cores were faster than the Athlon II.

The Athlon-II X4-640 performed very well against the lower end Athlon-II X3 and X2 processors that we tested it against. When overclocked to 3.8GHz it even got close and overcame to the performance of the i7 920, mostly in single threaded or low-end environments. As I mentioned during the testing, that is pitting a 3.8GHz quad-core processor against a 2.66GHz quad-core processor, and the slower still generally comes out ahead, but that really is to be expected from a CPU costing more than double the amount of the Athlon-II X4-640.

The Core i3-530 and the Athlon II 640 proved to have around the same overall performance level, making the decision of which CPU to buy purely a decision of which brand you like the most, if you are an average user.