Before we can do a conclusion, let's see the overall scores. Without L3 cache the Athlon II X4 does not do bad at all. For half the price of the i5 750 (without Turbo) you get nearly 86% of it's performance, that's not bad at all. Also the Athlon II/Phenom II is clock by clock faster compared to the older brothers, so the AMD Phenom 9650 with only 2.30GHz clock but with 2MB L3 cache does not stand a chance. Considering the extremely high power-consumption of this CPU it's clearly the inferior offer. 




To give you a better overview we compare system costs. We calculated the cost of the used mainboards, CPUs and graphics-card and also the lowest possible price for a 4GB kit for dual-channel or a 3GB kit for triple-channel. Memory of course PC3-12800 (1600MHz) with CL8-8-8-24 and PC2-8500 CL5-5-5-18. Last week we saw an increase of prices in the DDR2 market, which does hurt AMD a bit. So the overclocking memory settings may not apply but it gives you a good overview. The Q9450 is not longer readily available, and if you find it, you'll find it at horribly high prices, so we used Q9550 pricing. Because the Gigabyte EP45-UD3P is not offered any more we choose the MSI P45 Platinum price.

The market has shifted a bit since the introduction of the Lynnfield CPUs. The AMD offerings have fallen between €10 to €20, for instance the 965BE is now at about €180. Also the boards saw some price cuts. Even the Intel Q9 series got some minor price-cuts. All in all the AMD Athlon II 620 DDR2 platform has the best price/performance ratio of any system which could be matched with some 785G DDR3 boards.




Conclusion:

The AMD Propus core is not bad at all. While removing the L3 cache hurts performance in games, the overall scores show it can come close to the i5 750 (without Turbo) at half the cost. The only disadvantage AMD still faces is the incredibly high power-consumption and the ridiculous high default voltage settings.

The AMD Athlon II X4 620 is priced €79,38 which is as cheap as any Phenom II X3 offering. Now AMD is in a tough situation because we think the triple-core offerings make no sense at all. Even huge L3 cache can't compensate for one core less. Its sibling, the AMD Athlon II X4 630, is priced about €96 in UK and still above €100 in Euroland which is heavily over-priced.

However, if power consumption and thermals are your biggest concern, AMD should soon launch the Athlon II X4 605e at 2.3GHz and with a 45W TDP.

Regardless of the high energy consumption we feel that the 620 deserves our Top Value Award. We have shown how to lower the VCore and get the same or better performance so this CPU becomes even more attractive.