Years ago I used to build with AMD processors because I was looking for decent power at an affordable price. Their new Athlon X2 7850 Black Edition claims to do that for only $69.

So far reviews have been generally positive, with the consensus being that the 2.8GHz chip with 2MB of L3 cache isn't spectacular, but it can deliver enough performance to handle the latest games. Because it's a Black Edition, users are going to want to overclock this thing, and the Overclocker's Club concluded that while it can't stand up to triple and quad cores, it could beat the Athlon X2 7750 as well as the Intel Core 2 Duo E7200 in several tests. The overclocking process was a bit tedious and they could only push it to x1.5 over stock, but overall it gives you a decent bang for your buck. If you are looking for additional opinions on the 7850, Engadget has rounded up several reviews. [AMD and Engadget]