Athlon II X2 240e and Athlon II X3 435 are faster than similar-priced CPUs from Intel (with two exceptions, on Photoshop CS4 Intel CPUs were a little bit faster and on After Effects Celeron E3200 was 16% faster than Athlon II X2 240e, but Athlon II X3 435 was 12% faster than Pentium E5200).

Athlon II X3 435 costs only USD 10 more than Athlon II 240e and its extra performance is worth well over USD 10 if you will eventually run programs that benefit from having an additional CPU processing core available, such as 3D modeling and video conversion.

Although on-board video is not the best platform for running games, with AMD785G you can at least run them to see how they look like. With Intel G45 we couldn’t even run 3DMark Vantage and Fallout 3. And on Half-Life 2: Episode Two AMD785G was two times faster than Intel G45. Installing a GeForce 9600 GT to analyze only the CPU performance taking the motherboard out of the equation, these new entry-level CPUs from AMD proved to be faster than their Intel counterparts.

So while AMD may not have the lead on high-end CPUs nowadays with these new releases AMD will certainly be the queen of the price/performance and cost/benefit ratios on the entry-level arena.