So, this review was a bit of an odd one for me. I normally don't look at $60 CPUs or motherboard as options when building machines for personal use, however I have to admit my eyes were opened a bit by this one. Not only does the new Excavator core design perform exceedingly well at gaming and general use tasks, it actually beats out the more expensive Piledriver chips that are running at much higher clocks in a few tests! Granted, you don't get absolute bleeding edge performance, but for under $60, the AMD Athlon X4 845 is one heck of a deal! At under $120 for a CPU and motherboard pairing, it doesn't take much imagination to realize you can put together a very capable gaming machine for not a whole lot of Benjamins. The new AMD stock cooler for 95 watt CPUs is excellent all-around, providing worry-free temperatures and very little noise, except when really pushed for long periods of time. This is yet another bonus to this CPU as you don't have to toss the stock cooler, even with a bit of mild overclocking thrown into the mix. The lack of multiplier-based overclocking is a bit of a sore point, as it feels like the CPU has a lot more legs to it than the base clock allows for.