bit-tech Shopping: AMD Processor - 1 x AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+ / 2.6 GHz Energy Efficient

Rating: 10

Time with product: 25 Days

Strengths: Worked out of the box. Very fast and very cool.

Weaknesses: Factory cooler is kinda clunky and cheap.

Summary: As usual I have no complaints about this AMD Cpu. Very cool and extremely fast. Good warranty. I do not overclock so I cannot comment on those aspects of its performance. If you want long life and quite, invest in a quality CPU cooler. I added a Cooler Master Hyper TX2 and she is very quiet and cool. The factory CPU cooler is cheap and loud. THIS THING IS FAST, for me anyway. I upgraded from a single core AMD 1.2 Ghz.

Rating: 10

Time with product:

Strengths: Cheap and capable of most daily tasks

Weaknesses: Not as fast as Intel ones at same Ghz

Summary: I bought this CPU for my little Shuttle WHS box. It works great and idle temp is below 40C. The total system power consumption at idle is around 50W (1 500GB HDD, NO Optical drive, 2GB memory, 630a chipset). Perfect for no power hungry applications. I don't OC so I didn't buy the BE version. I am also buying a BE2400 (45w TDP) to see if that will lower the power consumption even further. It is important for a 24x7 box.

Rating: 8

Time with product: 7

Strengths: At 2.6GHz per core, it's faster than all of AMD's original X2 series of dual-core CPUs. It was also announced on the same date as the aforementioned Socket AM2 chipset for a reason.

Weaknesses: about the only task we don't recommend it for is extreme gaming.

Summary: It performed so well, Otherwise, it will give you fast performance at significant cost savings. The best example is our multitasking test. The X2 5000+ finished our test a few seconds faster than the Athlon 64 FX-60, which costs roughly $125 more. And even where it didn't win, the X2 5000+ turned in strong scores. Both its SysMark 2004 scores and its times on our multimedia tests trailed the FX-60 slightly. And for Intel's part, its $1,100 Pentium Extreme Edition 965 chip trailed the X2 5000+ on all but the stand-alone DivX 6.2 encoding test. In other words, the X2 5000+ is a great choice for digital content creation and fast day-to-day computing.

Rating: 10

Time with product: 3

Strengths: Cheap, fast, and has a TDP of 65W.

Weaknesses: None

Summary: I bought this to replace a 3800+ and it was the best decision i could have made. It went to an OEM eMachines box that i picked up for $250 and now that machine runs a little bit faster than the $1200 behemoth that i built nearly two years ago. AMD is a great value at the moment. Got the "vista scores" for the CPU from a 4.3 with the 3800+ to 5.2 with the X2 5000+. Exceptional improvement without and exorbitant cost to the consumer. Fantastic.