AMD might have been first to market with dual-core, but there has been a lot of silicon under the bridge since those glory days.

In recent times, Intel's Core 2 Duo has been showing everyone how dual-core should really be done.

Powerful processor

The E6850 is in fact an older 65nm chip, but it is still powerful. Considering the chip only has two cores to work with, it holds up pretty well to the Phenom 9550, and is a considerable improvement over the E2180.

Compared to the Phenom, the 1333MHz bus seems glacial, but it's got 4MB of L2 cache, which certainly helps.

Video encoding, while better than the E2180, is average, and really lags behind AMD's Phenom.

The game scores are strong though and you won't have many problems running most games on this chip.