First off, this review is not technical. If you want to see specific benchmarks and numbers then I suggest that you check out the review of the X2 line done by Toms Hardware.

I consider myself to be fairly demanding towards my PC but by no means am I an extreme gamer or anything like that. Instead I focus on my computer being able to do a very wide variety of tasks which include games, playing music and video, encoding music and video, run a multitude of utilities and surf the internet. My former processor was an Athlon 3000+ and for most of my purposes it did just fine. It would keep up in games and keep things running most of the time. The thing was that I tend to run more than 1 application at once, in fact right now doing practically nothing I have 2 Firefox windows open with about 9 tabs, 4 aim conversations, Winamp, a file transfer client, a widget client, xfire, antivirus, a desktop skinning application, and about 5 different hardware utilities. After I write this I might decide to start up World of Warcraft or possibly Counterstrike, without closing any of the aforementioned programs. While no one background thing uses much CPU time it all adds up.

Now many would just say, close some stuff and you won’t have any problems, but I actually use all of the stuff I have running and want it to be there, so I decided to upgrade to a dual core processor. The new processor, a 4400+ Athlon X2, has a clock speed that is only 0.2 GHz faster than the old 3000+ single core. This means that I was not expecting much of a performance increase with any one application, and in practice did not see that much. With my NVIDIA 6800 GTOC games only improved modestly. The real benefit though was the smoothness of the entire system. Games stopped lagging due to the competition for the processor. And windows itself handles things much easier without hanging. This upgrade was a major success because of this.

This however just describes the benefits with applications designed to work on 1 processor, instead of the 2 that are housed in the X2. Most current applications are designed to run on one processor only and the smoother performance I have seen has been due to windows managing applications and telling them which processor to run on. This means I can have windows, all of my normal background services, music, and chatting programs run on one processor while my game of Counter-Strike runs on the other. Already however there are some applications which are designed to take full advantage of two processors at the same time. These programs are made so that they can split the processing they need between two or more processors. The one application I have used which works this way is a DVD encoding program to back up my DVD’s. With the single core processor a single movie could take anywhere from 4 to 6 hours to encode. Now they only take about 2 hours which makes the difference between something you start before you go to bed and something you start before you go running.

As a whole, it is hard to go wrong with a dual core processor such as the X2. The overall performance of a typical multiuse system is enhanced in a way that few other technological innovations have managed. Truly the only reason why to not get a dual core processor would be in order to maximize the performance of current single processor applications such as games, but even these will most likely be appearing with more multi-core support. Even the original pitfall of cost is decreasing as Intel and AMD compete to deliver ever faster and cheaper products. In the 2 months since I bought the 4400+ the price has already come down by $50!

In addition to the general benefits of a dual core processor, AMD offers some unique features which make it more appealing than its Intel counter-parts. First and foremost is its power consumption. AMD’s X2′s use far less power than Intel’s current chips. This means that it will save you some on your power bill and will produce much less heat. The smaller heat output means that it requires a smaller cooler and puts less heat stress on your computers components. In addition switching to a dual core processor may not require building a new system, as the X2′s utilize the same socket 939 that AMD has been using for all of their 64 bit processors.

While any dual core processor from AMD will definitely be nice upgrade, the 4400+ holds a unique position in their lineup. It is the cheapest dual core to offer a full megabyte of cache on each core. This ensures the smoothest performance possible.

So next time your computer bogs down, your games hang, or you just want to play Counter-strike and World of Warcraftt at the same time, check out what AMD has to offer.