Athlon II X4 620 - AM3 CPU Review

Welcome to PCWizKid’s Tech talk. Today, I wanted to show you the new Athlon II X4 series. These are quad core Athlon II. The 620 model is the one that I'm looking at specifically today which is clock at 2.16 gigahertz by default so this is not a black edition. But it is a 45 nanometer technology CPU with two megs of level two cache on it. Okay, now the other thing that I wanted to mention is if you’ve got an older AM II plus board you will be able to put this in there if it supports it with the BIOS upgrade for example.

However, like most Athlons this one here does not come with level three cache and that’s why it’s cheaper. It does come with the standard architecture that you would expect from an Athlon. However, this one here is going to be priced a little but cheaper because of that. It does have another model the 630, not just the 620 which I'm looking at today. The 630 model is 2.8 gigahertz instead of 2.6 but again they’re capped on their multiplier. The one that I'm looking at today is at 13 times and the other one, the 630 is capped at 14 times.

Now the wattage of this is 95 watts as opposed to the Athlon II which were 65 watts, which I reviewed previously. My test system here it’s got main stream parts because this is a main stream system. A new main stream system so for you parents you want the latest but you don’t want to go crazy with 3D cards and stuff like that because it’s about playing games so this is great for them. You can get that at default. You can see here the voltages and the clocks. I did not overclock anything. This is how it’s running. This is the board. I did upgrade the BIOS though just in case and also, those are the memory timings for the DDR-3 that I installed, the Patriot RAM.

Now, I am using the on board HD 4200 because again I'm not doing any 3D benchmarks on this. This is a CPU benchmark review. You could see here that they are very low. Temperature is 25 degrees Celsius even lower if you enable cool and quiet and on full load its getting about 40 degrees Celsius max and that’s what the default clock speeds. Now, when I run further benchmarks like from Everest and software Sandra, just to see where it gauges the CPU to fall under compared to other CPU’s you can see here the E6700, Intel quad is faster than that. It’s faster than a Phenom X4 quad 9500 obviously and not as fast as a new Phenom II for sure.

Now, I did run other test on the software SiSandra here just to make sure to see what it had to say when it compared against the Intel core to dual E-8600, 8500 and 8400 so you can see here this three I compared against and it said that the Athlon II X4 was faster at 2.6 gigahertz. It was actually faster than all of those three. So that was pretty good so it gives you good idea and again this CPU is going for roughly about $99.00 or less depending on where you can get it so obviously were comparing on what can you get $400.00 compared to other CPU’s.

Now, here is Athlon II X2, Phenom II X2 you can see that the Athlon II X4 is halfway in between when it comes to CPU scores and not as fast as the Phenom up to triple in quad core of course.

But you can see here that this is pretty decent for the price right of what you're getting because it is meant for you parents for casual gaming and watching movies and stuff like that, it’s great. Right, you won't get any log or any stuttering stuff like that. Now you can overclock it of course. There is possibility to overclock the bus speed and that’s why I did erase it from 200 to 240 and then I decrease the HD link speed from 10X to 9X and then left the voltages at default. It did not increase voltages and it gave me a great 3.1 gigahertz and only increase the temperature by two degrees so that was terrific.

I also rent PC mic advantage just to see what it had to say with respect to the CPU scores and as you can see it gave great results almost matching the Phenom 2X2 which I had overclocked at 3.8 gigahertz. So that’s terrific based on what you can get from this none black edition CPU. So if you're looking for something main stream and you don’t want to spend to much money, hey, new quad core Athlon II are out. I definitely recommend it for main stream PC, anything with these many cores is definitely going to give some good results for sure from AMD. So I like to thank AMD for providing it and I hope you enjoy this video and thank you for watching.