In the end, Athlon II X3 425 left me with mixed feelings. Compared to its main competitor, Intel Pentium E6300, it wins in almost every benchmark, including games, and is still cheaper. Intel lowered the price of its entry-level Quad Core model Q8200, but considering performance compared to Athlon II X4 620 or Athlon II X3 it's still heavily overpriced. Intel's fastest Core 2 Duo E7600 with its 3.06 GHz clock manages to compete with AMD's X3 425 in some not so multi-threaded benchmarks, but as soon as there are more than two cores used during calculations, the E7600 drops behind the Athlon's performance… and it costs almost twice as much as the X3 425.
If Intel doesn't do some serious price adjustments, they have nothing that can compete against AMD's entire Athlon II lineup in the same price segment. But that doesn't seem to bother Intel for now, as they concentrate their efforts on the upcoming dual core processors for LGA1156 platform. AMD's biggest concern for now is the fact that they are making competition for themselves. On paper, the Athlon II X2, X3 and X4 price and performance categorization looks great, but in real life, it's a real mess, especially for non-experienced buyers.
As shown in this review, Athlon II X3 425 manages to perform on par with the more expensive Athlon II X4 620 in most tests, thanks to its 100 MHz higher clock. This is because most of the applications still can't efficiently use all four CPU cores, and the only tests in which the Athlon II X4 manages to justify its higher price tag are the ones that are really optimized for multithreading, such as Handbrake, 3D rendering and graphics, archiving applications, and some games.

Another problem is the presence of the lower-end Phenom II dual and triple core models, they aren't that much more expensive, but come with 6 MB L3 cache which helps in gaming and other benchmarks.

So in a $30 price range you will find AMD's Athlon II Dual Core, Triple Core and Quad Core models, as well as Phenom II Dual Core and Triple Core processors. Since each one of these has its specific benefits and shortcomings, it creates a different choice for the user.
Power consumption and gaming performance are the weakest points of the Athlon II X3 425. With stock voltage it draws considerably more than Intel's CPUs, although this can be modified with some voltage tweaks. Unlike power draw, there is no quick fix for gaming performance. It's still faster in games compared to Intel dual cores, and it will satisfy the needs of casual gamers, but you would do better with an entry-level Phenom II X3 700 model.
Overclocking potential is nothing special, but still a welcome bonus. The only problem with overclocking is that performance increases do not scale with clocks. As mentioned earlier, at one point it doesn't matter if your Athlon II runs a few hundred MHz faster, because it can't receive instructions and data fast enough to process them. This situation can be clearly seen in gaming benchmarks with overclocked settings.
So if you are building a budget HTPC or general use PC, dual core Athlon II models will do fine. If more budget CPU power is needed, Athlon II X3 or X4 models are a great choice, and for budget gamers Phenom II X3 models are still the best. As for our Athlon II X3 425 model, considering the price/performance/power consumption/overclocking, it really is in the middle of everything, and makes it harder to draw the line when you really need more than two, and fewer than four CPU cores.