Many people ask me the same question, why someone buy an AMD processor. The truth is that AMD's recent price drop made several powerful models look good again, compared to Intel's Core2 Duo line. After extensively checking with the specs and online prices, a friend of mine bought an AMD Athlon 64 X2 5600+ at the retail price of 115 euro. There is no real competitor at this price range and if the embedded 2x1MB L2 cache works as we imagine it'll probably be a serious contender to the much higher rated Intel CPUs. But first let's see what this dual-core Athlon has to offer.

- AMD Athlon 64 X2 5600+

AMD Athlon 64 X2 5600+ is not a newly introduced processor. In fact it has been in the market for a long time but due to its high price it wasn't affordable for a large number of users. The Windsor core design that this processor is based has a die size of 90nm and consumes 89 watts. AMD's line goes up to 3.20GHz (6400+) with the same characteristics. The well known Athlon X2 features are present here: MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, Enhanced 3DNow!, NX bit, AMD64 (AMD's x86-64 implementation), Cool'n'Quiet, AMD Virtualization technologies. The most noticeable features are the build-in L2 cache (2MB total) and the frequency of 2800MHz (14x200Mhz). The maximum Vcore is around 1.35V according to the full specifications:

For our tests, we used a retail AMD Athlon 64 X2 5600+.