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To start with, the Turion 64 X2 / TL line of chips is power hungry. It is really more similar to the Athlon 64 X2 than to the modern Fusion chip. They burn hot and run fast. Don't expect good battery life with any Turion. Don't plan to overclock without a good watercooler. In fact, running at stock speeds without overheating is a challenge (I recommend arctic silver thermal paste). I purchased the TL-66 as a budget 300mhz/core upgrade over the very adequate TL-60. Running primarily in Vista 64, the difference is noticeable and was well-worth the $50 for a new TL-66. The TL-66 doesn't consume any more power than the TL-60 does, and by turning up power management (allowing the CPU to drop down to much slower speeds when there are few tasks), I can actually get about 20 minutes more out of the laptop battery without any loss in performance from the TL-60. The TL-66 runs vista 64 very well, but it really shines if you pair it together with at least 8gb of ram and run other operating systems inside virtual box. It supports virtualization extensions and I've run as many as 3 different virtual machines, each on their own monitor on the host system with four monitors plugged in with decent performance in all of the simultaneous operating systems. If your laptop has a decent GPU with dedicated video ram, you should also get good performance at resolutions as high as 1920x1200, as this CPU seems to be able to hold up its end of the deal, if you can keep it running cool. For virtualization and high-resolution performance, the Turion X2 line is probably the most affordable type of mobile work CPU. When I compare the benchmarks on this to the Athlon 64 X2 4600 (a desktop CPU running at the same 2.3ghz as the TL-66), the TL-66 comes out nearly as fast as the Athlon and uses less than half the power. When I compare the benchmarks on this to the CPU portion of the AMD E-350 (a dual core netbook CPU running at about 1.6ghz), the TL-66 comes out about 3 times as fast but uses about 3 times as much power (The power difference is even greater when calculating in an additional GPU to go with the TL-66). The TL-66 benchmarks about 10% faster than the TL-60 (it's 15% faster in theory, but the best I can figure it is because bus speed is about 328 instead of 333). Overall, if you've got any laptop using a turion 64 x2 chip that uses a 65nm process, you should be able to upgrade to the tl-66 and notice a benefit (unless your hardware maker has locked out upgrades in the bios or soldered in the CPU). There is only one chip faster in the TL line (2.4ghz) and as of now it costs 5X as much as the TL-66 on eBay. It's a good value upgrade to get additional life out of your old laptop.Read full review
Obviously there are much better processors available, but can your system support them? Probably not, which is why you're looking at these Turions. Generally, any of the initial 64 bit AMD processors tend to fall into this category. I upgraded my e627 notebook from a TF-20 to this TL-66. Anything in the TL-6x, 5x, etc., will work. The TL-66 is a great upgrade for most systems that can handle it. It's one step away from "top of the line", and in my opinion is a better fit for an older system because it's less likely to overheat. Mine gets to 90 celsius before throttling back, but with some undervolting I have it running at about 75 at full load. Mind you, my laptop was designed for a single core processor running at 15 watts, this is a 35 watt dual core part. Even without undervolting, if you're running Windows, it seems to do a good job at handling the thermals and voltages by default.. So you likely wont have to do anything. All in all, considering this processor is performance-wise on par with some of the newest quad-core Baytrail offerings, I'd say it's still quite relevant. Made a world of difference in my 8 year old laptop. I actually have it running a DVR server connected to my HDHomeRun TV tuner, and it can simultaneously record multiple shows while streaming to multiple devices. The processor can keep up with it just fine. I'm actually typing out this review on the laptop with that processor while I have the DVR software recording shows at this very moment, WITH 3d desktop features activated. Thing isn't even sluggish right now, wouldn't even know it's recording if I didn't see the network activity light flashing like crazy. So if you're on the fence on whether an upgrade from a TF series processor is worth it, there is no doubt in my mind. World of difference.Read full review
Verified purchase: Yes | Condition: Pre-owned
The TL-66 is officially the first laptop chip to surpass Cray's 1983 super computer in speed and teraflops. This gave my old, old dell 1521 an almost 25% boost in speed. Not really designed for teardown and rebuild, this chip was an exercise in fun and discovery for me as even "slower" modern architecture beats this out in threads and cores. Fun anyway, and I've been discovering how fast linux can be even on older hardware
Verified purchase: Yes | Condition: Pre-owned
After replacing my laptop's original CPU (AMD Athlon 64 TF-20) with this one (AMD Turion 64 X2 TL-66), normal processes, such as opening/closing apps, surfing the web, watching Youtube videos, became MUCH easier to handle. Viewing the performance from the task manager (with Paint and Settings also open), CPU utilization went down from 100% to 5-10%. (As a side note, I used Arctic Silver 5 AS5-3.5G Thermal Paste.)
Verified purchase: Yes | Condition: Pre-owned
Changed my old cpu 1.9ghz to this cpu and now have a noticeable difference in speed. I wouldn't have expected that big of a difference but it is! It has put life back into my old Emachines 627 and I am going to really enjoy knowing that I did this upgrade.
Verified purchase: Yes | Condition: Pre-owned
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