AMD Athlon II X3 435

With three 2.9 GHz cores, the Athlon II X3 435 is a mid-range processor that's a direct competitor of Intel's Core 2 Duo E8000 series.  The addition of an extra core should allow AMD's processors to make up for their slower clock rate: a Core 2 Duo E8500, for instance, has a speed of 3.16 GHz.

Energy Consumption

If you take into account the three cores, energy consumption is pretty reasonable.  Although it uses more power than a Core 2 Duo E8500, that's logical enough as the latter has one fewer core to power.  In practice, that gives results of a little over 115 W while idle and 157 W while active.

Performance: Applications

It's hard to just stick to measuring performance when you put this CPU up against the E8500.  Intel's processor might be 8.5% faster on average, but the picture changes radically according to the task at hand.  For example, the Athlon is more than at home encoding a x264 video: our test only took 6 minutes 58 minutes, while the E8500 took 8 m 50 s.  On the other hand, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom allowed the Core 2 Duo to shine, clocking a time of 7 m 16 s to process a series of RAW photos and convert them to JPEG, compared to 8 m on the Athlon processor.


Performance: Gaming

With games, it's more immediately obvious that this CPU struggles, but it by no means performs badly.  Playing Far Cry 2 and Crysis Warhead, it's just a little bit behind the E8500 but it's powerful enough for a mid-range graphics card.  With World in Conflict, though, it is easily outclassed.  Its top framerate of 36 fps pales in comparison to the 43 fps produced by its competitor. 

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