AMD has always been one to play the pricing card in its never-ending tussle with Intel, but we get the feeling this introduction may pack more of a punch than any before it. It's a simple concept -- the $99 quad-core
CPU -- and given just how in love we Americans are with value menus, you can bet new PC builders will at least give the new Athlon II X4 620 ($99) and 630 ($122) a look. Reviews around the web essentially came to the same conclusion: it's not the fastest quad-core chip around, and the lack of L3 certainly doesn't make it the most attractive, but the 620 somehow manages to compete with all of the processors in its price range while being the cheapest. The "cut-down Phenom II," as
HotHardware calls it, suffers a bit on the gaming side due to the L3 removal, but in general scenarios it was plenty potent. Hit the links below if you feel like digging in way, way deeper.
Read - HotHardware
Read - TechSpot
Read - MaximumPC
Read - PC Perspective
Read - TweakTown
Read - PC Pro
Read - AMD Zone
posted September 16th 2009 8:53AM
I'm running windows 7 (64 bit) with a quad core right now and I believe that multiple core multitasking has been improved over vista. It seems to spread the load of heavy use applications over each core (e.g 3ds max) equally but with something small it only uses 1 core. Overall I've noticed a massive improvement over vista.
I'm not sure how optimized winrar is for multiple cores though, but if your moving from a Duo to a Quad then you should effectively be able to run twice the programs at once or at least much faster.
If only you can get a 4-socket mobo and use with these quads...