Introduction

AMD has not had the greatest acceptance of the K10 architecture, especially when released and the TLB bug that caused the L3 cache to become completely useless reared its ugly head.

This is now a thing of the past for AMD, but its stigma still makes its mark. Phenom was late due to the TLB bug and the repaired version didn't offer much of an increase that AMD said it would with the L3 cache enabled.

Moving ahead today though, Phenom II is one of the most versatile processors, due to its dual mode memory controller. You can easily put a Phenom II processor into any AM2+ motherboard and use it with DDR2 memory or AM3 based motherboard and run it on DDR3 memory and this is one thing AMD definitely got right.

AMD's own marketing strategy for Phenom II is for high-end market, and it leaves a gap for the mainstream segment, but not anymore we see.

Today AMD has its newest addition to the K10 family out using the Athlon naming, which gave them such a good hit all those years ago. Introducing the first quad-core mainstream CPU from AMD, which is dubbed the Athlon II X4.

We have the 620 model with us here today - how well does it perform? What does it offer? Let's find out!