Three is better than two and cheaper than four

I recently bought an AMD Athlon II X3 445 tri-core processor for just £57. An equivalent 3.1GHz Athlon II X2 255 dual core processor was just £11 less at £46 and a quad-core Athlon II X4 6.45 was £37 extra at £94. So the extra core to give an effective 50% performance boost for multi-tasking and multi-processing is just £11. This seems very good value.

I was able to easily over clock it to 3.5Ghz with the stock air cooler and some rather generic DDR3 PC8500 memory. This makes it even better value and the good basis for a gaming system where a quad-core CPU is not necessarily a benefit. It is obviously worth upgrading to an Artic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro fan and some branded performance memory.