Conclusions
In our recent review of the Phenom X4 9850, I said AMD had a small window of opportunity with the Phenom thanks to the slow rollout of Intel's 45nm desktop processors. With arrival of the Core 2 Quad Q9300 at multiple online vendors, that window is now beginning to close. At present, the Q9300's prices are a little inflated beyond its $266 list, but this processor still looks like a heck of a deal. Compared to the Phenom X4 9850 Black Edition, the Q9300 has all-around higher performance, markedly superior power efficiency, and apparently—despite its locked upper multiplier—more overclocking headroom. Also, thanks to a slight bump in clock speed, a faster bus, and the architectural enhancements in the Penryn core, the Q9300 is easily an improvement over the Core 2 Quad Q6600 on all fronts.

In fact, the Q9300's toughest competition may come in the form of the Core 2 Duo E8500. Are two faster cores better than four slower ones? Our benchmark results vary on that question, and software has been frustratingly slow to progress toward more threads. Still, the numbers themselves tell a story. The cores in the Q9300, at their stock speed, are more than fast enough to run today's largely single- and dual-threaded games. In applications where more threads are used, the Q9300 is often faster—sometimes dramatically so. On top of that, given that pretty much all recent Penryn chips we've overclocked have topped out around 3.2GHz, I'd have a hard time going for the E8500 over the Q9300. Either is a fine choice, but look for the Q9300 to be featured prominently in our next system guide.

As for the Core 2 Duo E7200, well, once it arrives, AMD will be hard pressed to sell many Athlon 64 X2 processors priced above whatever its list price turns out to be. And if most E7200s overclock to 3.16GHz on a 1333MHz bus as easily as ours did, this thing may turn out to be a new enthusiast favorite.