The good guys over at Tweaktown have reviewed the Athlon II X4 620 processor, a quad-core cpu for the masses. It’s not as hardcore as the AMD Phenom or Intel Quad Cores… but it’s a quad core cpu for under $100 bucks.

AMD’s own marketing strategy for Phenom II is for high-end market, and it leaves a gap for the mainstream segment, but not anymore we see.

Today AMD has its newest addition to the K10 family out using the Athlon naming, which gave them such a good hit all those years ago. Introducing the first quad-core mainstream CPU from AMD, which is dubbed the Athlon II X4.

(Caches) This is where Athlon II makes its distinction from the Phenom II line. Athlon II has had a cache cut done in order to save money on production as well as to reduce its overall performance.

Read the entire [ article ] over at Tweaktown.

Based off of the Intel LGA775 platform, Hardcore Computer’s Reactor – also Reactor Pro and Reactor Extreme at different price points – have the unique distinction of being one of the few non-conductive mineral oil based computers our there for public consumption. Yes… submersed.

I can remember back in the “overclock everything” days that people were overclocking everything from CD drives to water cooling their processors. Heck, even I had an overclocked and water-cooled AMD Athlon during those days. But some guys were removing all of the heatsinks, all of the fans and submersing their rigs in mineral oil and expensive non-conductive coolants. But Hardcore Computer’s Reactor isn’t overclocked – but it could be:

* Intel Core 2 Duo E8600
* One 650W power supply
* 2GB of RAM—2 1GB DDR3 modules
* NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GTX
* Samsung Spinpoint F1 500GB drive
* Pioneer DVD burner
* Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium 32-bit

For the prices, which start at $2998 USD up to $5837 (starting) for the Reactor Extreme, the features aren’t that bad. But I wonder can you cook with that oil.

Regardless, I’m waiting on the Intel i7 prices.

[ Hardcore Computer Reactor ]