AMD's yet-unannounced Athlon 64 X2 3600+ processor has materialized in Russian stores, and chaps over at the X-bit labs have managed to grab one and run it through a host of benchmarks and overclocking tests. As previously reported, the chip runs at the same 2.0GHz clock speed as the Athlon 64 X2 3800+ but halves L2 cache to 256KB.

The obtained results indicate that the new low-cost AMD processor that has already started selling turned out a very attractive solution. Although Athlon 64 X2 3600+ features half the L2 cache compared with the 'fully-fledged' dual-core Athlon 64 X2 CPUs and hence can be regarded as a “dual-core Sempron” at some point, its performance didn't suffer that much. In the worst case, Athlon 64 X2 3600+ is no more than 5% behind the 3800+ model with the same nominal clock speed of 2GHz. And in fact, there are very few applications like that. In other words, Athlon 64 X2 3600+ offers very decent performance, especially keeping in mind that it is less expensive than the 3800+ model.

If we compare the performance of our hero against Intel Pentium D 915, which will most likely be its primary competitor from the pricing standpoint, the AMD solution turns out a definite winner. Just like before, the new AMD processor on K8 microarchitecture outperforms the competitor built on NetBurst. Even the recent price wars didn't change anything, and the recently announced Core 2 Duo processors are still in a different price category.

The important advantage of Athlon 64 X2 3600+ is that it belongs to the Energy Efficient type with the 65W maximum heat dissipation. As a result, this solution will become very popular in quiet systems, because Energy Efficient dual-core AMD processors have always been a little bit more expensive.

As for overclocking, we managed to hit only 2.6GHz clock speed, which is not too impressive. However, on the other hand, the performance boost from overclocking appeared quite tangible. Athlon 64 X2 3600+ working at 2.6GHz can compete successfully with the top model in the family with 5000+ performance rating. So, those overclocking fans who decide to go with the new AMD CPU will be happy.