AMD's Athlon II X3 435 processor is a natural successor to the Phenom II X3 720 Black Edition that launched nearly a year ago. While the 720BE has an extra 6MB of L3 cache and an unlocked multiplier, in PCSTATS' benchmark testing the Athlon II X3 435 manages to outperform in almost every test by about 5-10%.

Overclocking was unfortunately not a saving grace for the Athlon II X3 435.

PCSTATS was able to take the Athlon II X3 435 up only 600MHz without resorting to voltage adjustments, while the Athlon II X4 620 (built on the same architecture) reached an easy 1GHz. As always though your personal mileage and methodologies may vary when overclocking your processor.

AMD is pushing the Athlon II CPU as a Windows 7 solution, and PCSTATS is confident that this processor will be enough to handle anything Microsoft's Windows 7 operating system will throw at it. The minimum system requirements for Microsoft Windows 7 are a 1GHz processor, 1GB of memory, and a DirectX 9 videocard.

The Athlon II X3 435 is a socket AM3 processor, so it's compatible with AMD's most recent Socket AM3 motherboards and socket AM2+ motherboards as well. If you already own an AMD-based PC and want to make a quick and painless upgrade to multi-core processing, this is an affordable choice.