The bottom line is that unless Intel drops its price to win favour on the Q9550 and Q9450/Q9400, like it did with the Q6600 when the original Phenom X4s launched, AMD's CPUs will be good value. The Q6600 at £160 will undercut them and still do 3.0-3.6GHz, however the Phenom II X4 at 3.5-3.7GHz will make it faster still and effectively price competitive.

We'd obviously still love to see a cut down £100, or even £150 Phenom II X4 do a large overclock on air: that would be awesome, but for now ~£200-£250 still isn't a huge ask for a competitive CPU that doesn't use a whole lot of power (until overclocked and heavily overvolted). While not the best performer we've ever seen, AMD has finally got a solid competitor it can sell on an inexpensive platform - this should readdress the balance quite nicely in the market.



Link: Bit Tech