AMD Athlon II X2 240e Pro Reviews

The new AMD Athlon II X2 240e processor is very promising for everyday work. We didn't have any problems with the processor except a memory issue that was resolved by down clocking our OCZ 1600Mhz DDR3 memory to 1066Mhz. Other than that the X2 240e performed exceptionally in both temperatures as well as power consumption. This processor also works very well with overclocking, which means that overclockers can enjoy messing with this CPU without worrying much about making their processor unstable. When the X2 240e was overclocked to 3.85GHz temperature and power consumption was not an issue either, which is why I would recommend this processor for anybody who is looking for low temperature and low power consumption processor for their workstation or HTPC.

Today AMD is announcing triple core Athlon II processors, along with a whole slew of low-power / energy efficient dual, triple, and quad core Athlon II chips! All the "e" rated chips run a max TDP of only 45W. Today we are going to take a quick look at the Athlon II X3 435 and Athlon II X2 240e CPUs. All these processors are priced aggressively against their Intel counterpart and should lead to some stiff competition.

When matched up with AMD's 785G chipset on a microATX motherboard, it's possible to build a tiny Athlon II X2 240e-based system for less than $400. The only real thing stopping the Athlon II X2 240e from sweeping the low-wattage, low-price processor market is that AMD already has another processors just like it. It's a tiny margin though, so either processor can be a winner in the right setting.

AMD has much work ahead. We think AMD could lower the TDP of all its CPUs by decreasing the VCore. As our under-voltaging tests prove there is quite a lot of headroom. The energy-efficient CPUs can go even lower as we have proven in our tests. We were impressed with the overclockability of the 240e, which also managed 3.80GHz but at a much lower VCore compared to the 245.

This dual-core CPU offers good budget-grade performance for everyday PC tasks while consuming half the power of similar chips under full load.