Last month saw me going slightly giddy over AMD's latest budget chip and the first quad-core CPU we'd seen for under a ton. This month, as is its wont, AMD has got its triple-core Athlon II X3 mojo going and its latest chip is hitting the streets.

It's essentially the same basic chip as the Athlon II X4, but with three-quarters the cores and three-quarters the cache. The clock speed though has been increased to a shade under 3GHz, but is this enough to keep this budget CPU in demand?

Well, it's still a good chip. It was a great chip as a quad-core and it's still doing most of the work with one of those cores missing.

Because of the higher clockspeed you can see the performance in single-threaded applications best that of the quad-core version we looked at last month, but inevitably when we put some serious multithreaded applications to the test predictably it falls behind.

All that is to be expected; given that this chip is a tenner cheaper, it should give up probably a tenspot's worth of performance. Maybe that's a new metric we should use? It's tenspot-tastic?

Anyways, all sorted then with this new budget chip – if you want quad-core processing on the cheap go for the Athlon II X4 and if that's less of a concern the triple-core chip should give you a decent half-way house processor. Job done. Next.

Oh no, wait... Except no, that's not how it's going to work. You see, much like with the current crop of graphics cards, AMD is competing here with its own processors.

Crowded house

We qualified last month's excitement over the Athlon II X4 by saying that if you wanted good, all-round performance between single and multi-threaded applications then it was a good bet, but if you were a gamer the Phenom II X2s were by far the better choice. And that still stands true.

The 3.1GHz Phenom II X2 might be the same price as the Athlon II X4, but there is a slightly slower Phenom II X2 running at 3GHz flat, and that, like this X3, is only £65. See where things get difficult for this new Athlon II?

The Phenom II is just going to blow it out of the water in any gaming metric you care to use, and also on any single-threaded app. It may just about be able to hold its own in multi-threaded applications by virtue of the extra core, but the extra cache, speed and tech in the Phenom II still keeps it competitive.

There's also the golden ticket nature of the dual-core Phenom IIs - if you pick up the right one you might be able to unlock one or even two dormant cores and bag yourself a quad core for chump-change. But that's by no means a given.

As I said though, this Athlon II is a good chip, unfortunately there is just no place for it in this increasingly crowded end of the CPU market.

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