AMD Athlon II X4 620

The AMD Athlon II X4 620 is one of two quad-core “Propus” processors released in 2009 as a direct competitor to Intel’s LGA 1156-based Corei5 and Corei7 processors, as well as a peer to AMD’s Phenom II.

It hosts all of the features of the Phenom II — including 45nm architecture, four cores with 512KB L2 cache, and 64-bit support — but lacks L3 cache memory, which may lower performance, but will inevitably result in greater efficiency. In fact, critical testing by experts has revealed that the Athlon II X4 620 performs especially well with overclocking (up to 3.9GHz with air cooling). Other than the lack of L3 cache, which hampered clock speeds, there is really no difference. Ultimately, critics cite the 620 as being an attempt by AMD to stay in the market, especially by providing a highly-affordable solution with top-notch specifications.