Like the superheroes of old, the AMD Phenom II streaks out of the night to lay waste to your enemies with 3.0GHz quad cores, each of which has L1 and L2 caches. An additional 6MB of L3 cache is available to handle really heavy loads or large data sets.

Memory transfers get faster than ever. HyperTransport Generation 3.0 mode allows up to 16.0GB/s of bandwidth. Up to 17.1GB/s memory bandwidth for DDR2 delivers an amazing 33.1GB/s of processor-to-system bandwidth. This unprecedented bandwidth is needed to feed the data hungry AMD64 with Direct Connect Architecture cores.

You'd think that all of this power would be too hot to handle. Think again. AMD's Cool'n'Quiet 3.0 technology works with CoolCore Technology to minimize heat while keeping power and efficiency up. Now the cores can shut down unused parts of the processor when not in use. This saves power and helps to reduce the amount of heat generated. This function is built in so there's no need for drivers or BIOS updates.