AMD have impressed me again. The Athlon II X3 440 is an impressive chip. 3 guaranteed cores that can clock over 3.7ghz is very impressive indeed. Yes it\'s missing an unlocked multiplier like the Black Editions AMD offers but with such a high stock clock and a high standard multiplier it\'s still a good prospect.

Plus there\'s always the outside chance your chip might have a fourth core that can be unlocked which provides yet another perk at a fairly budget price.

As i\'ve stated before - as long as your motherboard offers an unlocking capability and has clocking credentials the ingredients for a very decent performance increase are all there.



Gaming and general desktop performance is quite comparable to the competition from Intel too which is nice. Especially when you consider the i5 750 and i7 920 are over twice and three times as expensive respectively.

I recently concluded that AMD are back on target with this range of chips and i can honestly say that the Athlon II X3 440 does nothing to tarnish this impression. Budget builders (and even high end users looking for some cheap kicks) should take a serious look.

Pros

+ Impressive overclocking performance
+ Smooth windows and gaming performance
+ Cool running
+ Extremely well priced considering potential performance increase (see next point down *)
+ * Core unlock potentially offers a fully unlocked and high clocked quad core processor
+ Great backwards compatibility with DDR2 and DDR3 memory controller
+ Good price/performance ratio will stand it in good stead against Intel\'s new i3 range

Cons

- Not quite as friendly/easy to clock as an Intel... however, once again i\'m really splitting hairs here!!!

The Athlon II X3 440 is an exceptionally good budget processor. In my opinion once clocked it has the potential to provide 90% of the performance of the competition whilst being half the cost. It\'s consequently been a very easy decision to award it our top accolade - the Vortez Hardware \'Gold medal\'.