We came to several interesting conclusions during this review.

Athlon X2 4600+ achieved a higher performance than its main competitors, namely Pentium Dual Core E2180, Pentium Dual Core E2160 and Celeron E1400, in most scenarios. When it wasn’t faster, it achieved the same performance as these other CPUs. The only program where Athlon X2 4600+ was slower than its competitors was on Photoshop CS2. So if you are building an entry-level PC and want the fastest CPU available and want to spend only up to USD 70 we definitely recommend Athlon X2 4600+.

In fact it is interesting to see that AMD has the advantage on low-end CPUs, since on high-end CPUs Intel has the lead.

Another thing we discovered during our review was that for gaming the CPU won’t play a major role like it used to be in the past. This means that if you use a low-end video card (we used a GeForce 8500 GT during our review) the CPU won’t be the component limiting gaming performance: it will be the video card. So if you are building an entry-level PC and at the same time willing to play games, it makes more sense to pick a cheaper CPU and a more expensive video card than the other way around. Of course if you won’t play games it is better to stick with a cheaper video card (and even using on-board video) and invest on a faster (and more expensive) CPU.

As you already know, our secondary goal in this review was to see the impact the L2 memory cache has on computer performance, since we included three Intel CPUs with the same architecture, same internal clock rate (2 GHz), same external clock rate (800 MHz) but different cache sizes (512 KB, 1 MB and 2 MB).

The answer is not so simple: it will depend on the program.

On MP3 encoding and games (read the above explanation on why) we saw no significant performance difference.

On TV and Movies, DivX encoding and Photoshop we saw only a very small performance difference.

On Music and Communications scores from PCMark Vantage we saw a somewhat significant performance difference.

And Productivity score from PCMark Vantage and on Cinebench, on the other hand, the performance difference was huge.

Our conclusion is this. If the difference in price isn’t big enough – as it occurs between Pentium Dual Core E2180 and Celeron E1400 – buy the CPU with the larger cache. But if the price difference is big (for example, Core 2 Duo vs. Pentium Dual Core), buy Core 2 Duo only if you will really use the extra performance. For the average user that is looking for a PC just for doing basic functions like browsing the Internet, using a word processor, checking e-mails, etc, Core 2 Duo is probably overkill. In this case stay with Pentium Dual Core E2180 or, better, Athlon X2 4600+.