Any of the Phenom IIs with 6MB of L3 cache would be best. I believe the fastest Ph X2 was the 570 Black Edition.

The only dual-core AMD I have is the Opteron 185 for S939. I run mine at 3GHz. It's definitely not AMD's fastest, but it still does a great job of running the XP games that I can't get working properly on my main computer.

I have one of those dual core Opterons for a S939 system as well (runs toasty).

Why dual core specificly?

I've used a Athlon II x2 270 I think (3.4GHz) for mostly older games. Worked perfectly fine and it's easy to use as many boards of the AM3 age sometimes had troubles using high-powered CPUs.

the newest AMD CPU I have used was a Sempron 140, it's an Athlon II 2.8 with one core disabled, I thought the chip was pretty decent, very fast for what it was, some Athlon IIs have default clocks over 3.2GHz, they must be all you need for dual core gaming and more, they were a clear improvement over K8.

now PII X2 is even better, but not really a native dual core 🤣

candle_86 wrote:

Why dual core specificly?

Mostly because everyone is ditching them for 4-8 core systems so now is a good time to stock up while cheap.

I don't play new games so I don't have anything with more then 4 cores in the house.

All the Athlon II chips are getting dumped for cheap, i can buy X4 640's all day for under 10 bucks, and Q6600's are also stupidly cheap.