AMD Athlon II X2 250 Regor Dual-Core 3.0 GHz Socket AM3 65W ADX250OCGQBOX Processor

Pros: Great value/performance when building an AMD-based system with a thermal envelope requirement. Native Dual-core design and 45nm reduces the size of the chip and extra bits of silicon that waste power.

Cons: Currently there is a bug Cool 'n Quiet bug in AMD firmware. I prefer my heatsinks to be overbuilt so that the system can withstand higher temperatures without having a loud fan. The stock heatsink is quite small compared to what I would prefer.

Overall Review: I understand that most people on this site are enthusiasts, but the purpose of CPUs in general is not to see how high you can overclock them and then complain that Y chip is a better deal. The fact is: if you have a monetary budget, a thermal budget and need reliability, you buy the best chip available for your needs. In the AMD spectrum this chip blows away the old Athlon X2's, Kuma series Athlons (7750 & 7850) and even some of the first generation Phenom X3's and X4's (for certain tasks). This chip isn't for everybody but for it segment of the AMD market it is a superb piece of silicon.

Pros: Priced competitively. Runs cool. Preliminary overclocking, max stable overclock for my setup was 3.5ghz @ 1.35v(SEE OTHER thoughts as to why I can't go higher). Low voltage at 3ghz was 1.15v, ideal for HTPC setups. My 3.5ghz was done with an SB600. Reviews out in the wild, all give the Athlon II favorable recommendations. I haven't found a stable 4ghz OC yet from reviewers yet. This processor will most likely hover around the 3.8ghz range for many enthusiasts. This is a much needed improvement for AMD's dual core line. I wanted a 7750BE to replace my aging 5400+, but I'm glad I waited, as the 45nm processors are way better overclockers.

Cons: Memory controller is only capable of DDR2 800mhz or DDR3 1066mhz -wish AMD would change their minds and make a BE Athlon II versions. As of now, they do not plan on making Athlon II BE version at all.

Overall Review: My setup: Athlon II X2 250, MSI(790X chipset) KA92 CF-F version1, 4gig Adata 1066mhz DDR2, Zalman 9500a HSF. In order for the MSI board to work with the new processor I had to upate the BIOS to the latest version. Unfortunately there is definitely a bug with the BIOS version 1.9. I am unable to down clock my HT multiplier, nor my memory speeds. Downclocking the CPU multi worked. I also used AMD Overdrive to downclock the HT and it still does not work. Because I can't downclock my HT and memory, I am unable to determine as to what is causing my system instability when overclocking. Hopefully I can budget a new motherboard, preferrably a AM3 board, and see how far I can take this CPU.

Pros: I just finished my third build based on a Regor CPU. Right now for the price they cant be beat; the flexability of these are awesome. Building a budget gaming PC? I've overclocked these to 3.45 on stock volts, 3.8 with a volt bump. Add $100 dollars worth of video card and youve got a great 1680X1050 performer in most modern games. Building an HTPC or home office machine? You can undervolt these quite a bit. Have my AII 250 running in a htpc undervolted to 1.20V (from 1.35) w/ stock cooler. Survived 24 hr prime 95 and never broke 39C in a 79F room in arizona. Thats how power efficent these things are. Lots of folks complain about the small heatsink; trust me, you dont need anything bigger, they generate so little heat. I passively cooled one of these using a coolermaster Gemini for another HTPC build. If you can get a good deal on a motherboard combo like i did, the vaule is unbeatable.

Cons: The fan on the cooler is not silent. Its quiet...but for a cpu that generates so little heat I should not hear it in my HTPC box IMHO. Dont let this keep you from buying it. Rather, if you demand absolute silence vs quiet, you will need a new CPU cooler. Other than that, I can't see a single con...for the price range this thing is a beast.

Overall Review: Google Athlon II reviews and check out some performance numbers and you will see that this is an awesome buy. It can be used in AM3 boards and paired with DDR3. It is better than the intel offerings in its price range unless you are an extreme overclocker and want to push that E5200 to 4.0Ghz. I will be buying these for many builds in the future. Last note: mine works great in a Gibabyte GA-MA785GM-US2H; the 785 chipset is very nice.

Pros: By far one of the most thermally efficient processors I've owned, right alongside the Intel Atom. The heatsink barely gets above room temperature while idle, and only a few degrees above that when its doing something. Don't let marketing fool you into buying more than you need -- this little CPU is a -FAST- dual core processor. The large L2 cache per core means it runs faster than all AMD Athlon 64 x2 models and most Core2 Duos. The 1" deep stock heatsink and fan are both adequate and quiet, and there's no need for anything more.

Cons: Regor's onboard memory controller only supports DDR3 at PC3-1066 speed, while cores other than Regor support 1333 speed as well. This isn't really a con, as it is listed on AMD's feature comparison website, but it isn't listed in the specs on NewEgg. Overclocking the memory controller to use my PC3-1333 at it's normal speed didn't give me any performance benefits, so I'm running at 1066 to keep the components cool and happy.

Overall Review: Remember that TDP is not the same as power consumption. TDP is generally how much heat that components are designed to dissipate before they start to damage themselves, and that all heat is wasted energy (on the CPU's part). Based on my power meter, this processor consumes between 20 and 50 watts of power, depending on load (and going on estimations for my other components). This part scores a 6.5 on the Windows Experience index in Windows 7 (using 4GB of PC3-1066 memory in what I believe to be dual channel mode.)

Pros: -its fast -its affordable -45 nm = less heat & less electricity

Cons: none

Overall Review: the cpu fan can be loud for a sec during boot up, otherwise its good. Its I can tell its faster then a 7850BE and puts out way less heat. I was sitting next to my tower with the 7850BE and i could feel the heat coming out of the case to my legs. With the case of the x2 250, i cannot feel the heat. Heck, i bought two of these, really good product, i stand by it.

Pros: This thing is a MONSTER it over clocks to 3.75ghz with a 1.45Vcore and despite the fact its 65watts it feels as though its a 45 watt chip. For the week or so I have owned this chip I have yet to see it peak over 40 Celsius ONCE. This thing literally makes all my games and programs fly at me.

Cons: Without any L3 cache it doesn't matter how far you clock this chip, it will always fall a little behind in certain benchmarks.

Overall Review: I m using the Sunbeam Core Contact Freezer.

Pros: Low power draw - Low heat production - 3.0 GHZ speed - True dual core ( not a flawed quad core)- Faster hyper transport speed than previous generation - low cost. Abillity to finally use memory above ddr2 800 with AMD's dual core processors.

Cons: A year behind !

Overall Review: This is the processor that I and many other mainstream users were looking for from AMD over a year ago. I used the 4850e ( 2.5 ghz 45watt) processor previously among several others from AMD as it was in my opinion the only acceptable dual core processor from AMD due to its low heat output and power draw. The 780G chipsets northbridge would run unacceptably hot with any cpu that was above 65watts, which completely ruled out all of AMD's previous generation 3.0 GHZ cpu's for my use. This new processor is designed for the mainstream user and in my opinion it is a complete HOMERUN !!! My only complaint is AMD should have had this a year ago.

Pros: Awsome performance while "sipping" power and staying good and cool (on the Stock HSF no less). I encode video to DVD, play games, movies, flash video, multiple browser tabs all the time, background apps (monitors, firewall, active AV, dropbox, rocketdock, music etc), downloads, uploads, all on W7 Ultimate x64 without a hitch. CPU tops out for a second or two when launching into intensive programs or games, but I don't think I've ever seen it stay at 100% on both cores, ever. Plenty of power to run day-to-day geek tasks and most newer games. Scores a 6.5 in W7 index. Cheap too! This is the loaded Toyota midsize, not everyone needs to Hummer! You can run this thing pretty long/hard before you will realize or notice that it's not a quad core, that's just how smoothly it multitasks on a cleanly-run system. Running: 4x Google Chrome browsers (multi tabs) Zune player Multi Explorer windows Active AV Firewall Sys. Monitors DropBox MS Word Steam Both cores below 30% @ 21*

Cons: Only a dual core. Not really a con but you can't expect to get a quad core running at this frequency for 70.00. You can, however, expect a 2.6ghz quad core for 99.00 (look for the Athlon II X4). AMD has come back to the game with these re-designed dual cores. Efficiency and low heat/power qualities are key here, not brute power.

Overall Review: Antec 300 Illusion case MSI 785GTM-E45 AM3/AM2+ MB AMD Athlon II X2 250 Regor 3.0ghz CPU G.Skill 4GB (2x2GB) DDR2 800 Raidmax Hybrid 2 RX-530SS 530W PSU WD Caviar Blue 320GB Sata 3.0Gb/s HDD XFX HD-485X-ZDFC Radeon HD 4850 1GB GPU 16x Lite-on DVD-R ODD No overclocking. TF2 - Everything maxed @ 1080: 106fps average L4D2 - Everything maxed @ 1080: 60fps average UT3 - Everything maxed @16x9: 70fps average Runs Crysis Wars @ 1300 or so on "good quality" settings smoothly. Runs Section 8 just dandy, Hawx will run at 16x9 smoothly, even in dogfights, and of course it'll beat the snot out of BF2 (waiting for BF: Bad Company 2 to drop!!!). This rig will also encode an hour+ AVI for DVD format (audio/video_ts folders/files) @standard-def in about 20 minutes. 25 and you've got a dvd-player ready disc. All case fans set to "low" (there are 4 in this case) and using Stock Heatsink/Fan. Ambient Temp in room is 72*f. Cold boot, login, desktop w/ rocketdock up and ready ta