Recently STH took a look at the AMD Athlon II X2 260 Regor chip and found it to be fairly power efficient and fast enough for most tasks. AMD has virtually every $5 increment in the sub-$120 CPU space covered, so today I am looking at a CPU that costs approximately $30 more, but has two additional cores. While the architecture between the Athlon II X2 260 and Athlon II X4 640 are similar, the dual core part runs 200MHz faster and has 1MB of L2 cache per core versus the quad core’s 512KB of L2 cache per core. It would have been nice to see a Athlon II X4 4MB L2 cache part, but for more on-die cache one can just look to the Phenom II line with its L3 cache, so the Athlon II X4 does make sense given AMD’s market segmentation. AMD has a CPU right in the Intel Core i3-530 and i3-540 range that is very competitive in terms of price/ performance. Read the full story

AMD’s focus on low power and low cost CPUs and chipsets keep them at the forefront of home server builder’s minds when spec’ing a new build. After investigation of the Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition yielded great performance with lots of power consumption and the Sempron 140 EE offered solid power consumption figures but anemic performance, it is finally time to look at something in the middle. Today we will be reviewing the AMD Athlon II X2 260 Regor CPU which is a dual core AMD CPU with 2MB of L2 cache running at 3.2GHz. Adding twice the number of CPU cores and twice the cache of the Sempron 140 EE is sure to add performance and power consumption, but it has half of the cores of the Phenom II X4 955 BE and does not have a huge L3 cache using power.

To keep things consistent, I brought back the Corsair Dominator GT (DDR3 1600 C7) box used in the Sempron 140 review as the WHS enclosure for this review. Yes, this is a WHS in a cardboard box take II. Read the full story

After using one of the the lowest power AMD CPUs around, the Sempron 140 Sargas (single core) in a WHS, I decided to go to the other extreme and try a Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition. With the release of six core AMD CPU’s, and the existence of the Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition, the  Phenom II X4 BE chip is not the highest end AMD CPU out there. On the other hand, WHS is currently based on the older 32-bit Windows Server 2003 kernel, so it runs on dual core CPU’s just fine. The impending release of Windows Home Server V2 VAIL means that 64-bit will be the new requirement and a bit more power will be needed for future WHS systems. A quad core is overkill but a six core CPU is basically a waste for WHS. Luckily, with the Phenom II X4 955 BE’s unlocked multiplier, we can emulate a Phenom II X4 965 BE through a very mild overclock, and some other AMD CPUs as well. The following is a quick review of what I encountered with the Phenom II X4 955 BE, and how I managed to get the Phenom II X4 955 to boot using the PicoPSU (to get comparable idle power consumption figures).

Phenom II X4 955 Boxed

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