This is very fast, very inexpensive, and if you are lucky (and have an appropriate motherboard), you can unlock an extra core. The AMD processor Athlon II X3 445 is more or less a Athlon II X4 640 with one core and its associated 512KB L2 cache disabled running at 100MHz faster (therefore it has three 3.1GHz cores and 1.5MB of L2 cache). Some users will purchase the Athlon II X3 processor and a motherboard capable of unlocking the disabled cores in the hope of saving a few dollars to get quad core processor.
On one hand, a user may get an Athlon II X3 440 that is a perfectly fine Athlon II X4 640 that AMD decided to simply turn off a fully functional core. The risk of unlocking a core with a major dysfunction is relatively low as usually a severely deficient core will cause immediate problems.
Frankly, the difference in price is generally in the $10-20 (USD) range, so we would suggest that if one requires full quad core performance, that one simply purchases the appropriate quad core part. $10-20 is generally not worth the risk especially on a $1,000+ home server.
The Athlon II X3 445 Rana CPU is rated at 95w TDP and uses AMD Cool’n'Quiet to keep the idle power consumption low. This was surprising because the power consumption was very similar to the Athlon II X4 640 despite the X3 445 having one less core. Then again, modern CPUs do a fairly good job at powering down unused cores so at idle this makes sense. Also, different stock voltages could be to blame as not all CPUs come with the exact same voltage requirements from the factory. This power consumption at load is directly between the Athlon II X2 260 and the Athlon II X4 640 which makes sense given the core count. What this does highlight is that not all 95w TDP parts are created equal since the X4 640 clearly uses more power doing the same task.
Overall, for many WHS systems that sit at idle much of the day, AMD does a fairly good job with power gating to keep inactive cores from using a lot of power at idle. This is evidenced by the relatively similar idle power consumption numbers between the Athlon II X2 260, Athlon II X4 445 and the Athlon II X4 640 and under 100w of total system power consumption means that the CPU will dump less heat into a storage server or HTPC than the quad core variant while transcoding video.
The Athlon II X3 445 Rana part did as expected, placing between the Athlon II X2 260 and the Athlon II X4 640. The Athlon II X3 compares well to the Intel Core i3-530 and i5-650 in the transcoding benchmark also but falls well short of the Intel Xeon X3440. Both of those Intel chips are dual core parts with Hyper Threading so one can surmise that at the low end a dual core Intel part with Hyper Threading is approximately equal to a triple core AMD Athlon II. The venerable Core 2 Quad Q6600 shows its low clock speeds, easily being outpaced by the higher-clocked and more power efficient Athlon II X3, despite the Q6600′s massive L2 cache. For someone recycling old parts (a lot of people have left-over Q6600′s as they were very popular CPUs), it is hard to make a case for the Q6600.
AMD’s Athlon II X3 Rana is a strong performer, but it is the middle child in AMD’s Athlon II range. The Athlon II X3 does not save much by way of idle power consumption over its quad core part and does not have the same maximum performance characteristics. The Athlon II X2 260 is a lower idle power consumption part but does not have the same performance as the Athlon II X3 445.
Price wise the AMD processor Athlon II X3 445 is between the AMD processor Athlon II X4 640 and the AMD processor Athlon II X2 260. Optimizing for low power, one would clearly pick the Athlon II X2 260 and optimizing for performance one would clearly chose the Athlon II X4 640. This makes the Athlon II X3 a worthwhile purchase if one needs exactly the X3′s performance and power consumption characteristics since if one wanted more or less of either, they would go to the X2 or X4 ships. It is a hard sell for the home server and HTPC market, but it does not detract from the fact that the X3 is a great performer at a really low price. If anything it fits AMD’s tightly segmented low end chip profile just perfectly.
Product Features :
- Operating Frequency: 3.1GHz
