AMD FX 4300 

It's still more than capable of achieving some impressive overclocking - I was able to quickly ramp up the clocks to 5.11GHz by following the same process as with the six-core chip - but even then it's lagging behind the FX-6300.

The original Bulldozer FX-4170 had the same dual-module, quad-core make-up and ran at an industry-leading 4.2GHz straight out of the box.

Yes, the architecture may have been improved beyond the original Bulldozer spec, but for reasons unknown, AMD decided to drop the speed of this part by 400MHz, hobbling any performance increase in the process.

The Core i3 is locked so it has no OC love to give, y'see.

The fact that, on the quad-core side at least, we're looking at a retrograde step is rather worrying.

If it wasn't a literary impossibility I'd say it was even truer… there's just over a fiver between the price of the six- and four-core Piledriver CPUs, and that makes the weaker of the two essentially pointless.

Sadly though, with the FX-6200 being so close in price - roughly £15 more - there was little point opting for the quad-core chip when the six-core version offered similar speeds with an extra Bulldozer module.

Had AMD decided to release this chip with more of a sensible price gap between it and the next processor in the lineup, there might have been a case to make for this quadcore Piledriver.

I was also able to push it up to about 5GHz with some fairly rudimentary overclocking.