Athlon II X3 435: AMD's Three-Core, 2.9 GHz, $87 Triple-Threat

By Don Woligroski
published

Today AMD introduces what might turn out to be the ideal budget CPU, with three cores for multi-threading, a relatively high 2.9 GHz clock speed, and an impressive sub-$90 price tag. How does it stand up to the rest of the company's Athlon and Phenom IIs?

Multitasking Benchmarks

In order to test multitasking performance, we ran the World in Conflict: Soviet Assault benchmark while an AVG anti-virus scan was running in the background.

Here is another area where we can see the 6MB of shared L3 cache in the Phenom II models come into play. The Phenom II X2 550 and X3 720 demonstrate a large advantage over their Athlon II X2 and X3 counterparts. However, the Athlon II X4 620 beats out all of the competition when these programs run concurrently, despite a complete lack of the shared cache memory. Even when overclocked to 3.77 GHz, the Athlon II X3 435 barely beats the minimum frame rate of the Athlon II X4 620. The higher number of CPU cores wins the day when multitasking; no surprise here.

Don Woligroski
85 Comments Comment from the forums
  • wintermint
    AMD CPUs been appealing to budget builders lately :)
    Reply
  • invlem
    I think my HTPC just found its new processor, been running a 5200+ for the last while
    Reply
  • ominous prime
    AMD is really thriving in the budget sector, I wonder how the i3's will affect the market. I hope AMD can get back to head to head with Intel on the high end though.
    Reply
  • rdawise
    Smart move by AMD by attacking the budget crowd (especially around the holiday season). I am surprised how well this thing did against the X2 550! Seems like a good candidate for a budget gaming/multipurpose build. Any release dates available (for NewEgg)?
    Reply
  • tacoslave
    this is awesome but (and its a big one) i kinda wanted to see something that pwns intels core i7 in everything. Kind of like what they are doing in the graphics department but total domination. How long will i wait!!!
    Reply
  • lemonade4
    http://media.bestofmicro.com/O/H/227681/original/Athlon%20II%20X3%20CPU-Z%20Stock.jpg

    2 cores 2 threads?
    Reply
  • JonathanDeane
    3 cores at almost 3Ghz for this cheap? Hmmm not a huge AMD fan but this is plenty of CPU for most people. I would snap one up if I was building a system right now.
    Reply
  • DokkRokken
    That's one impressive little chip! Pair this with a 770 chipset and you'd have the basis for a cheap and cheerful gaming PC!
    Reply
  • cleeve
    lemonade4http://media.bestofmicro.com/O/H/2 0Stock.jpg2 cores 2 threads?
    Aha! Thanks for catching that. After I had done the testing I was playing around with disabling CPU cores in the OS, and I forgot to turn them back on to take the screenshot. Fixed!
    Reply
  • sonofliberty08
    did the disable core of Athlon II X3 435 can be unlock ?
    Reply