It is a great processor but if you’re looking at the future, go for the Athlon II X4 instead which does not have the L3 cache. It all depends on your usage. If you want to play games today, go for the Phenom II with all the cache that it comes with. If you’re looking at running applications in the future faster (which will be designed to take advantage of multi-core processing) go for the Athlon II X4. The Athlon II X4 comes at a sweet price too.