It would have been nice had the E4300 OC and the BE-2350 OC been included in those graphs.

Also, in addition to cinebench rendering, power consumption during gameplay would hold my interest.

Something I found odd is that the E6400 uses less power than the E6300. If the E6400 has an L2 stepping, doesn't that bear mentioning?

Thanks for all the good info, as always. My soon to be built x2 SMP folder will definitely be running a 690 chipset.

As others have mentioned it would be great to have some watts per gigahertz numbers for the 2350 vrs the 3600 at various clock speeds and Vcore settings while folding. Mainly wondering if the 2350 will make up the price difference in saved electricity at ~2.5GHz and at ~2.0GHz with min. Vcore.

I have to be honest... i could see using this chip even if you had no intention of using it for HD content. Just because you do not own a HDTV does not mean you are not interested in having a HTPC setup. Heck I'm looking at turning a really old P4 system into a HTPC that will basically do nothing but play videos over the network.

P4 1.5GHz
256MB RDRAM (yuck... i know)
40GB Hard Drive
FX 5200 128MB
Audigy LS (will work for what i will ask of it)

Not the greatest setup in history... but like i said... I'm not asking BD / HD-DVD playback from it.

OK, OK, nice to see that AMD is getting a grip on the 65nm, BUT: it's either coffee with milk or *caffè* latte...

Oh, well. Let's look at power consumption.

best quote =]

The review of an HTPC processor is incomplete without testing the noise level of a low-noise HSF idle and under load. I'm very surprised that TR didn't include this in the review, especially after the situation set up in the intro.

Otherwise, the review was pretty good, and this is probably the processor many people will move to these days. It performs well and is much cheaper than other processors that, for many, bring only wasted performance to the table.

http://www.hothardware.com/articles/AMD_BE2350/?page=9

BE-2350 performs worser than 4000+ in many cases

I have never understood the urge to use a computer wherea simple cheap dedicated thingy does it fine. As for hd dvd / blue ray.. until its 79.95 at walmart and the tv to play it is 249 also at walmart.. it can kiss my massive hairy ass. Ill stick to my 40 buck dvd and dirt cheap 27 inch tv.

Good review.

Great price for a dual-core CPU > 2GHz, especially with such low power consumption - if you use AMD's chipset (which seems reasonable at this price point).

I have a 690G based motherboard with HDMI, and a 65W 4800+, and I just need to mod the case fan to make it practically silent. It's a pretty good system and it was cheap. The temperature within the case is right about room temperature (the case came with two temperature probes built in, odd but hey!).

Lots of the standard benchmarks showed that it was more than good enough for the vast majority of users, so good for AMD and their OEMs, and consumers. Just couple it with a passively cooled 8600 and you can game fairly decently on it.

I undervolted my X2 3600+ Brisbane with RMClock to 1.15V and compared the power consumption against the hothardware review of these 45W chips. I got almost exactly the same result in terms of power saved per GHz but without using the same power supply and motherboard VRM I can’t confirm how meaningful this is.
i.e. (Watts under load at stock VCore – Watts under load at lower VCore) / GHz at load. It came to ~ 7.5W per GHz saved.
So these are just factory under-volted CPUs in the main! Not that this is a bad thing but as someone that has been successfully undervolting K8 chips since 130nm this isn’t a big deal.
The same goes for the 90nm 65W parts which were generally nothing you couldn’t do yourself using RMClock with a few exceptions.
The 45W thing is a bit smoke and mirrors in that they are only available up to 2.3 GHz. I would expect that ANY 65nm X2 at 2.3GHz could be undervolted to fit the 45W TDP.
Intel could probably label an E6300 as 45W if they wanted to without even changing the VCore: 1.86 / 2.67 * 65 = 45W
With the new L2 stepping offering lower power consumption anyway and with added under-volting who knows what can be achieved with C2D.

OOOOR I could stick to dvds until blue ray/ hd dvd gets cheap and then just step to the new gizmo. My old wally world dvd is 4 years old and going fine.. should last till blue ray is cheap.

As for codecs .. I listen to music and watch dvds... thats it.. everything else is either in ms format or quicktime or divx or some player its show in or streamed... nt a big deal and not something I need a 60lb paperweigh/heater in my livingroom for. Or yes even one of those little cubes or slim media pcs.

I don't want to overstate things on this front; the Core 2 Duo E4300 is also known for ample overclocking headroom, and a 3GHz Athlon X2 isn't likely to match a Core 2 at 2.5GHz in overall performance.

Shouldn't that be 3.5GHz (a high end OC for the 4300), not 2.5? That Allendale costs $114 as well.

It should be noted that the regular 3600x2 Brisbane only costs $60, but obviously isn't a slam dunk to get to 3GHz with stock cooling, like your sample.
I'm hoping to get that far with the one I just got, but with water cooling.

dual core 3.0ghz for 80 bucks . . .

sweet!

The real boost to the media centre PC will come later this year.

What we need is a cheap mATX mainboard based on an integrated chipset along the lines of the nvidia G80. This could give us full 1080p hardware decoding for mpeg and x264 with HDMI and HDCP. That's what's holding us back today.

The CPU isn't really very interesting as AMD offers us nothing that Intel doesn't already.

Pentium E2160 for me on Asrock DDR1 compatible boards...so long AMD!

FWIW my brisbane x2-3600 sample is running at stock speed with 1.0volts. I was mightily impressed by that. I imagine that brings it's power consumption down to the be-2300 level. My sample also made it to 3.003GHz, but I didn't feel comfortable giving it more than 1.4volts; seeing as Damage's sample survived that voltage I assume mine would. Still, I simply don't require that much performance. Even for gaming my x2 at 1.9GHz is quite adequate. Only when time to completion is a factor would I think a more powerful processor is necessary.... and yet I still find myself lusting for a cheap c2q or possibly phenom-x4 when they launch some time in 2009.

Now that the whole world has seen the wisdom of adding 64-bit extensions in hardware and continuing to use only 32-bit software, AMD figures its work here is done.

*applaud*

what is the power consumption of this processor after OC?

Given the comments here, and reading a couple reviews myself, it seems as though there's a wide range of variation between these processors. According to Anandtech,, they couldn't get their BE-2350 to break 2.4GHz (footnote in the Final Words section).

http://www.benchmark.co.yu/print.php?sid=13250
http://xtreview.com/addcomment-id-2106-view-Pentium-e2140-benchmark...

Pentium E2140 performs better than BE-2300 and it is cheaper

Pentium E2160 performs better than BE-2350 and it is $2 cheaper than BE-2300.

They only the advantage of BE-2300/2350 is that they they consume less power

So, in other word customers have to choose between performance and power consumption. Personally, I choose performance

My 65W Athlon 64 4600+ suddenly seems inadequate. :(

The problem is nowadays to decode HD Videos in a MediaCenter PC.
At least i stumble here always over the Problem where the rest of the Hardware is expensive enough that an100$ Tag for the Processor isn't an issue anymore.

I wonder if this Processor can take on full HD Video playback without any problems.

If you've got some spare time can you do a test to see what the minimum voltage at stock speed is on the 690G. Can it do 2.1ghz at 1.0v? If so can you include power measurements of this as well.