Introduction

"I want a new PC and I don’t want to have to pay a lot of money for it!!” That seems to be a very common demand when potential clients discuss system builds and upgrades with me. The economy and current trends in price reductions have brought about the era of computer user that needs performance, yet needs a price the fits their current financial situation. It has been harder and harder to build these PCs to meet this demand without having to utilize older technology to meet the price constraints, which has lead to some performance losses for the overall system. With this growing trend, I couldn’t help but wonder to myself whether the major CPU manufacturers had abandoned the budget class.

AMD had always been a go to company for me when I needed a CPU that would perform well but not cost a lot for the system I was building. Over the last year, there hadn’t been much in the way of advancement of the budget class, however, which led me with the choice of better performance from using a Phenom II based system or suffering a performance loss and sticking with an AM2+ CPU and DDR2 memory. Over the summer, AMD released an Athlon II AM3 chip, which gave me hope that there might be a resurgence in the budget CPU market by AMD. That day has finally come.

The AMD Athlon II X3 435 and X2 240e are the latest releases to the budget AM3 family. The Athlon II X3 435 and X2 240e feature boosts in overall performance with high efficiency in mind, especially with the “e” series green chips. The anticipated performance characteristics and ability of utilizing DDR3 memory on a budget system make these chip releases a big deal for the budget PC market. Finally there are choices for those on a budget that don’t have to fit into the category of “low” performance.