The Athlon 64 X2 5600+ is one of the lowest priced (in the $100-150 price range) AMD processor you can buy today. Its retail price of € 115, makes it a very interesting choice, considering what Intel offers at this price range. There are not much to discuss here, we have thrown tons of tests that showed a mixed bag image. The memory performance is better at AMD processors than Intel's and that's a fact.

The embedded memory controller, the 2x1MB L2 cache and the 2.80GHz helps this processor to perform superb in several tasks and of course rank high in benchmarks. Depending the task, it's even possible to see the Athlon 5600+ to complete the task faster than even an Intel E6600 processor. There is an area where currently sold AMD processors cannot compete, the overclocking. Unfortunately, the X2 5600+ runs already in high speed so you can only squeeze a few MHz from it. So I wouldn't try to overclock an AMD Athlon X2 5600+ unless its absolute need. Overall we are satisfied from what the Athlon X2 5600+ has to offer in both performance and pricing.