Off Topic:
As the O.P (simon22) was keen on "fragging" we have done a brief look at the gaming side of things and seen that the Intel® Core™ i3 has on average a slight 6.1% performance advantage in the selection of games used by Anandtech, still for the price premium you would expect something right? . . . interesting to see some games playing at the same FPS and one game running faster on the AMD® chip . . . .
Now in an effort to highlight why I think the Athlon™ II X4 makes a more suitable chip for a general-purpose machine I cherry picked a few
MultiThreaded benches from the same Anandtech database that highlight the processing power advantage the AMD® Athlon™ II X4 offers! . . . . It seems when the heat really gets turned up then four real cores will pretty much always outperform a DualCore with HyperThreading!
That's a pretty sigificant demonstration of how when used with Software that craves processing power the
AMD® Athlon™ II X4 really delivers with a healthy 24.8% performance advantage . . . and the AMD® chip costs less?
So many people constantly under-estimate these Propus cores but from where I'm looking they seem to be such good value for money, play games great, deal with Multi-Threaded software great, very good platform interoperability, OverClock well, affordable . . . . what is not to like?