Thinking about going for a PC upgrade? Curious to know about how these new AMD Phenom X3 triple core CPUs perform? I sure was thus I was interested to see this ExtremeTech review of the AMD Phenom 8750 triple core CPU. It’s essentially a quad core CPU with one of the cores disabled (it’s a way for AMD to still sell quad core processors that don’t quite make the grade by disabling one of the cores).

So why the interest? Well these new Phenoms are in the same price range as an Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 processor and thus make for an interesting case – are three cores better than two cores? Of course if you’re familiar with computing, the answer is “usually yes.. ,but it depends.” As with all multi-processor systems, the more processors or cores you have, the smoother your OS performance will be. Does it translate to faster performance for applications? Within an application – not always – it all depends on how the application is designed. However, if you’re a person who runs lots of applications simultaneously, then you’ll definitely appreciate more cores.

So with that said, here’s the verdict:

AMD has a midrange gaming powerhouse in this Triple-Core Phenom. Perhaps AMD is on to something with the odd core count.

Triple cores are better than two cores – but of course. Are four cores better than three cores? Yeah.. that’ll be the case too if you’re a person who runs in a multi-application, heavily multi-threaded environment.

[Check it out]

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