The Best Sub-£100 CPU

AMD Phenom II X2 560 Black Edition

Manufacturer: AMD
UK price (as reviewed): £69.99 (inc VAT)
US price (as reviewed): $94.99 (ex tax)

CPUs that carried the Black Edition moniker used to be limited to the top-end models of each family. This is because processors with the Black Edition tag are blessed with an unlocked multiplier – an enthusiast feature that adds extra flexibility when overclocking.
AMD has steadily increased the number of Black Edition processors, however, and you can now buy the Phenom II X2 560 Black Edition for £70.

Learned readers will be able to discern that the X2 560 BE is a dual-core processor (as designated by the X2 part of its name), although they may not know that the two cores are based on the 45nm Callisto core, which was first introduced back in June 2009. As the processor is a Phenom II model, it sports three levels of cache – 128KB of L1 and 512KB of L2 per core, and a comparatively huge 6MB pool of shared L3.

The stock speed of the X2 560 BE is 3.3GHz, the highest on test. This means that the CPU has a TDP of 80W, however, which is relatively high for a dual-core CPU. The X2 560 BE also supports memory speeds of up to 1,333MHz and is compatible with DDR2 and DDR3.

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The CPU’s high clock speed didn’t help much in Cinebench 11.5, though, as its stock-speed score of 1.95 was lower than those of Intel’s cheaper and lower-clocked Pentium processors. The same was true in our Media Benchmarks, as its overall score of 1,054 was 99 points behind the Pentium G620’s, and even further behind more expensive Pentium processors.

Gaming proved to be only marginally more successful for the X2 560 BE; at stock speeds, it was slower than quad-core processors such as the Phenom II X4 955 BE and the A8-3850. Clearly, our two test games enjoy having more than two cores.

Overclocking the X2 560 BE was a fairly simple task and we quickly found the processor’s maximum stable overclock of 4.25GHz. This was achieved with an HTT of 305MHz, a CPU multiplier of 14x and a vcore and CPU/NB voltage of 1.565V and 1.275V respectively.
At these speeds, the X2 560 BE’s performance significantly increased, jumping 266 points in the Media Benchmarks. This placed it ahead of all the non-overclockable Pentium CPUs. Gaming also saw a decent boost, particularly in Arma II, which appears to love extra processor frequency.

Overclocking the CPU had a dramatic affect on its power consumption, however; when overclocked, and at full load, the system drew 290W from the wall with the X2 560 BE installed, which is the third-highest result we saw. As a result, it’s hard to recommend the Phenom II X2 560 BE unless you’re willing to overclock it. Even then, the £70 Pentium G850 is almost as fast, and without the need for a pricey overclocking motherboard.

Specifications

• Frequency 3.3GHz
  
• Core Callisto
  
• GPU N/A
  
• Number of cores 2 x physical
  
• Cache L1: 2 x 128KB, L2: 2 x 512KB, L3: 6MB
  
• Packaging Socket AM3+
  
• Thermal design power (TDP) 80W