AMD has rounded out its Athlon II family this week with the addition of two new budget chips based on its 45nm K10 architecture, the Athlon II X2 245 and 240. These dual-core parts are positioned below the AMD Athlon II X2 250 processor that was launched earlier last month, and have been specifically designed to provide users with a cost-effective and energy-efficient alternative for their home PCs.

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I you are an Intel fan this recent wave of new AMD cpu's should be considered great news. its no coincidence that Intel has just announced across the board price cuts (except for i7) I have purchased three of the new line of AMD's Phenom II x4 955 BE ,Athlon x2 7750 BE, and the Phenom II x3 720 BE. AMD is putting the pressure on intel with well positioned very high price/performance products. great to see AMD being competitive after the Phenom I debacle.

Red there's a difference between being competitive and being outperformed. This is great for the low to mid end market, which is the majority of the cpu purchases. Having to sell more cpu's at a lower price is what? Whole Saleing. Done get me wrong. I love amd, but RIGHT NOW I love intel more. The HTPC area of my life loves amd, but the pc gamer loves intel. I'm waiting for them to come with cpu's that can match intel's current line up, and not the most current over a year ago.

Again, I'm no fan boy, I'm waiting for amd to step up some more and I'll buy some of their cpu's for something other than an htpc or a budget build.

the phenom II beats all intel chips except for i7 and when gaming it matches the i7? so to be fair, for gaming they do match Intel.

Intel sucks.i built 2 machines with the advantage to intel and i'll still take my amd,it matched or bettered the intel.at the time i had an FX-60 AMD and an intel 8500 3.0ghz.

At times I wonder at the readers' or rather the reporters' logic.

What do you have here Epsom Derby where "won by the nose" winner take all? Recently I built several Phenom II systems at close to half the price of Intel platform. Incidentally Intel's main bread and butter business here in India still is Dual core and not Core 2 Duo. They perform very well indeed.

To top it all off Intel graphics suck big time.

The AMD new dual cores look useless IMO and already outdated and simply not effective CPU's. The quad looks interesting to me however, but I would take an Intel E8500 or E8600 over it though and go straight to i7 after that.

I like amd's price points, but the phenom 2 is on par with the q9 series of quads from intel. Yes amd computers are good for gaming. I wasnt saying they weren't. So to be fair, a hand full of their chips are good for gaming, but they do not match intel as far as the tick tock line up.

If or when AMD releases a quad-core cpu that can rival or beat out the i7 chips I would gladly move back. I loved my old Athlon XP processors, and I still use a few here. The only problem is I still look down on nvidia-based chipsets, which most AMD boards use. I've just had really bad luck since my nForce2 platform boards way back when. Ever since I moved to Intel chipsets it's been smooth sailing.

You changed your avatar super?

Was getting fond of Mario, I think thats what it was?

yeah, i had to put up the amd ship sinking for the fan boys.