Electronic: AMD FX 4-Core Black Edition FX-4300

This is the 3.8/4.0GHZ (Base/Overclock) version. If you want higher clock speed, you will have to buy an 8-core model. Requires an AM3+ socket. I have a 6-core slower version of this chip. Some of the cores are usually idle, so I would expect any additional cores above these four to mostly sit idle unless you have many tasks running at once. It is a black edition which means it will let you overclock. I don’t overclock but I a prefer a black edition CPU because it means the chip has been tested to run faster than spec. This implies it will run extra-reliably at nominal speed. Has extended instruction set including AES encryption in hardware. Suitable motherboards include ASRock 970 EXTREME4, Asus M5A99FX PRO R2.0 or the ASUS SABERTOOTH 990FX. You want a motherboard with AM3+ socket and room for at least 16 GB of DDR3-1866 RAM (233 MHz multiplied) There is no point is getting such a fast CPU then hobbling it with slow RAM. Some people use DDR3-2133 and overclock. For hairy chips like this, you want a good quality power supply and heavy-duty cooling. The chip alone consumes 95 watts.

On Chip Cache

Level 1 is small and fast. Level 3 is big and slower
Level 1 cache size is 2 × 64 KB shared instruction caches and 4 × 16 KB data caches
Level 2 cache size is 2 × 2 MB shared exclusive caches
Level 3 cache size 4 MB shared cache.

There are at least two newer 4300 4-core models. The newest and cheapest is called the Vishera.