This processor is one of the very first of the 45 nm AMD processors and one of two that are socket AM2+, all the rest are Socket AM3 and use DDR3. It worked out of the box in a moderately-priced Gigabyte 780G board and works excellently with Linux. Cool 'n Quiet 3.0 in this chip works much like Cool 'n Quiet 1.0 in the K8-based AMD processors, where the CPU clocks down to a set speed, 800 MHz in this case, and all of the CPU cores move up and down together in speed. This is different than Cool 'n Quiet 2.0 on the 65 nm original Phenom processors, where each core has a separate clock and idle is half of the maximum core speed. CnQ 2.0 supposedly had some issues and the 65 nm chips ran warm, but the Phenom II runs flawlessly and never got above 43 C on the stock heatsink, which makes me believe that the thermal power is something more like 80 watts rather than 125.

This processors is very fast and reasonably-priced and highly recommended.