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Athlon II Quad or Phenom II Dual?

Soldato
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Man of Honour
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If you have a motherboard with the 710 or 750 soughbridge I'd probably get the Phenom as there is a chance you may be able to unlock the other cores and end up with the equivalent of a 955BE :) There are no guarantees though.
 
Soldato
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Depends on what mobo you have, but i think with either i would seriously recommend overclocking, even if its by a tiny amount. The dual core may hit 4ghz and the quads have already been shown to break 3ghz easily. Its a bit of toughie, but i think if it was me iI'd get the phenom for the possibility of extra cores. If they dont unlock then I'd just overclock it to around 3.8 if possible. The dual core will have much more cache, and a higher clock speed making it better for gaming.
 
Associate
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personally i dont recommand tri-core because i think its too "gimmicky" and the core unlock doesnt always work, plus its unstable if it does.

i think the answer it what you want do most with the pc, i would say

AMD Phenom II X2 Dual Core 550 3.10GHz Black Edition (Socket AM3) for gaming

AMD Athlon II X4 Quad Core 620 2.60GHz (Socket AM3) for multi-tasking and just general work
 
Man of Honour
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personally i dont recommand tri-core because i think its too "gimmicky" and the core unlock doesnt always work, plus its unstable if it does.

i think the answer it what you want do most with the pc, i would say

AMD Phenom II X2 Dual Core 550 3.10GHz Black Edition (Socket AM3) for gaming

AMD Athlon II X4 Quad Core 620 2.60GHz (Socket AM3) for multi-tasking and just general work

Personally I think tri core is probably a good sweet spot right now. We are moving from a position where there is benefit to having more than two cores but not much really needs four cores. Three cores is good value and thereis always the chance of unlocking that fourth core (again not guaranteed though).
 
Associate
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If it's for gaming I would go with the dual core. For the money you will get a higher clockspeed and most games don't utilise 4 cores very much if at all. If you want to do video encoding or other cpu intensive tasks then you should go for the quadcore.
 
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As already mentioned , for pure gaming then the phenom dual core is better. However the new Athlon x4 quad is good too. It has a lot lower catch and that does not help for games however it performs pretty well as a decent low power quad cpu everywhere else , regardless of the low catch. It would feel snappier around the os for sure.

McT
 
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