The Best Sub-£100 CPU

AMD Athlon II X2 250

Manufacturer: AMD
UK price (as reviewed): £43.89 (inc VAT)
US price (as reviewed): $61.99 (ex tax)

The AMD Athlon name is looking very long in the tooth. In fact, the first Athlon CPUs appeared all the way back in 1999. The range has seen its fair share of successes and failures, and made its name when facing off against Intel’s NetBurst-based Pentium 4 CPUs.
AMD now uses the Athlon name to denote low-end CPUs such as the Athlon II X2 250, which, at just £43.89, is the second-cheapest processor on test. Under the heatspreader of the X2 250 is a pair of Regor cores, each of which has a 128KB pool of L1 cache.

This is complemented by a larger 2MB pool of shared L2 cache, although the processor lacks the L3 cache of its more expensive Phenom II siblings. The two cores of the X2 250 run at a not insignificant 3GHz, which is achieved by using an HTT of 200MHz and a CPU multiplier of 15x, while the on-board memory controller can deal with memory speeds of up to 1,333MHz. AMD rates the processor as having a TDP of 65W, which is average for a modern dual-core CPU.

We didn’t expect the X2 250 to set any performance records, so we weren’t surprised to see it score a measly 1.73 points in Cinebench 11.5, beating only the woefully underpowered AMD Sempron. Interestingly, the X2 250 performed better than the more expensive Pentium G620 in WPrime, but scored only 921 points overall in our Media Benchmarks suite – the second-worst stock-speed result on test.

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The X2 250 doesn’t include an on-board GPU, so we could only test the CPU’s gaming performance with the discrete HD 6850 1GB we used for this Labs test. Unfortunately, the X2 250’s lack of grunt was also apparent; its results were poorer than those we saw from the marginally more expensive Pentium G620.

The silver lining for the X2 250 is that it can be overclocked. Even pushing the processor to 4.2GHz – using a vcore of 1.55V, a CPU/NB voltage of 1.275V and an HT voltage of 1.3V – only moved the CPU to a mid-table spot in our Media Benchmarks. This was enough to leapfrog the two cheaper Intel Pentium CPUs, but it failed to trouble either of the Core i3s, although these cost almost twice as much as the X2 250.

Gaming performance also saw an appreciable boost when the CPU was overclocked, although the CPU suffered from having only two cores – most of the processors that performed better had four cores or two additional Hyper-Threaded cores.

The X2 250 is a disappointing CPU at stock speeds, but gets a decent boost if heavily overclocked. If you have only £50 to spend on a CPU, the Pentium G620 guarantees a similar level of performance as a 4.2GHz X2 250 without the need to overclock or buy
an expensive overclocking-friendly motherboard.

Specifications

• Frequency 3GHz
  
• Core Regor
  
• GPU N/A
  
• Number of cores 2 x physical
  
• Cache L1: 2 x 128KB, L2: 2MB
  
• Packaging Socket AM3+
  
• Thermal design power (TDP) 65W