The release of the Athlon X2 7850BE, or for that manner any fast dual-core processor is as always a much welcomed one. Reality is that the 7850BE is tiny small step forward compared to the 7750BE. The good thing is, the price remains the same and that 7750BE actually got cheaper.

The Athlon X2 7850BE processor will cost you roughly 79 USD. As such it's really a budget processor. The processor however packs decent muscle and has reasonable overclock potential. Our world however is changing fast and everything is moving slowly to multi-core (more than two) processors. The applications and test software here on Guru3D.com have all been updated over the past year to reflect that fact as best as possible. This is the moment in time where we slowly start to see the real benefit of processors with more than 3 CPU cores, and that definitely showed in the benchmarks. As such budget dual-core processors show a bit of a disadvantage in our charts, anno 2009.

Value for money wise, processors like the 7850BE really are hard to beat. These are excellent processors to play your games quite decently, or hey .. for just normal PC desktop usage it's more than fine. If you ask me .. the direct competitor would be an Intel Core 2 Duo E8200. Fact is that the 7850BE is roughly 8~10% away from Core 2 Duo E8400 (159 USD) performance.

Also a processor like shown today would be ideal for a HTPC. It has enough muscle for even High-Definition decoding jobs over the processor and in combo with a 790GX chipset motherboard, you might have something really valuable in your hands. Granted, personally I have had a sweet spot for the 3-core Phenom II X3 720BE processor for a while now, but even so, the reality is that the X3 processor sells at 145 USD, and for many of you that might beyond your budget. The next best thing from AMD will be the 7850BE for sure.

We do however like to state that the Phenom II architecture made very big steps forward. And for AMD to remain successful in the dual-core market, we here at Guru3D.com would really like to see dual-core processors move away from Kuma and go for that Phenom II architecture. Try to imagine Phenom II based dual-core processors at, say 3.2 GHz. That certainly would be a very interesting product. I'm a big opportunist though, don't blame the player ;)

Until then, the 7850BE is the next best thing in line, it's priced at 79 USD and a small step faster than the now 66 USD 7750BE. As such the Athlon X2 7850BE is a very decent dual-core processor, at a decent price. True value kicks in pretty nicely here.

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