Overclocking a Core 2 Duo would usually involve reducing the initial memory speed and simply ramping up the Front Side Bus speed until it can't take anymore, at which point you may consider voltage increases to push further. Overclocking the AMD Athlon II is not particularly difficult but there is more to think about when compared to the equivalent Core 2 Duo setup. On paper, this sounds like a fairly reasonable proposition but with this comes our testing theory. Speaking of price, this 3.00GHz unit weighs in at just £55. The main advantage of this arrangement means that the size of the core has decreased, making it cheaper to produce and also allows the processor to sit in the lower 65W TDP envelope. The only other advantage is from AMD's point of view, in that they don't have to speed bin and cripple perfectly good Deneb Quad Cores in order to meet a quota of lower end stock. While the loss of so much Level 3 cache would surely hamper the processor's performance in certain applications, the increase in Level 2 cache does compensate somewhat. While it has many similarities with the AMD Phenom II "Deneb" core, it has absolutely no Level 3 cache but instead has two dedicated banks of 1024kB Level 2 cache, an increase from the 512kB per core found on Phenom II. The AMD Athlon II X2 250, is currently the fastest processor of it's product family. As you may have observed, the Athlon II sports a new core.