Hardware Overclocking AMD's Phenom II X3 720 BE

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/cpus/2009/05/11/overclocking-amd-s-phenom-ii-x3-720-be/1

For under £120, AMD has a fast 45nm triple core CPU that's unlocked and prime for overclocking. We walk you through our experiences and settings with a bevy of popular motherboards to show you that this budget monster is well worth considering.

 

thanks, fixed - Tim S

 

Ah, great article, thanks!

The question is - could you get such a good overclock using much cheaper motherboards? £150 seems quite a lot to me. Would a £70 board do?

 

one comment about the multitasking test you run whilst running a compression and also running an HD movie is generally a real world scenario its not really a test of multi tasking as it is only running two tasks would not testing say a 6 task environment on a machine where HDD throughput is not the limiting factor be a better test of the chips capabilities

also interesting to see that the phenom perorm well in file encryption is there an explanation for this.
finally why did you run the compression test on winrar yet use the 7 zip benchmark doesn't winrar have an internal benchmark also
it would be interesting to see some 7 zip benchmarks so that we can compare to the results of that to the multitasking environment as if AMD had a significant lead on the 7 zip surely that would kind of negate the multitasking results given that only two tasks are running.

nice to see AMD being somewhat competative again

 

For the Intel parts, a Gigabyte EP45-UD3R is fantastic for under £110, if you don't want crossfire. It is great to see AMD offering competitive products again, I just hope they can stem their financial problems, otherwise the people who price Intel's extreme edition CPUs might be let loose on the rest of their range

ps - Bindi, what cooler did you use?

 

Could you make the graphs in teh game section easier to read? Some of the points are hidden behind the graph line and I have no idea what the colours represent. The blue and the green dots could be one of two things each but what is the red one?

 

A very interesting read!

And this made me think about a few things like;
How would a older AM2+ motherboard with a 720BE do in comparison. (including overclocking)
How would the 720BE behave on water cooling.
Why is Gigabyte, a brand known for very good motherboards, motherboard components and overclocking seems to fail considerable compared to a MSI motherboard. (to be honest; MSI is not the first choice when it comes to overclocking)
Including a PhII X4 955 into the benches would be nice (including overclocking)

 

Nevermind, for all those who want to know:

The blue dot is the Intel Core 2 Duo E7500 + 4GB DDR2 1,066MHz memory + Asus P5Q Deluxe motherboard.
The green dot is AMD Phenom II X3 720 Black Edition + 4GB DDR3 1,600MHz memory + MSI 790FX-GD70 motherboard.
The red dot is Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 G0 + 4GB DDR2 1,066MHz memory + Asus P5Q Deluxe motherboard

 

This thread should supply a lot of good information about what each mobo is capable of reaching. http://www.overclock.net/amd-cpus/475649-amd-phenom-ii-x3-720-oc.html

 

i'm one of the few people with an early AM2 board, and recently upgraded from an Athlon X2 to a Phenom X3. Obviously i'm not anywhere near these benchmarks, but i can say with absolutel certainty that adding the third caore makes a huge difference.

Really looks like AMD have something to fight wtih finally. The fact that they're cheaper per FPS than the intel (even if the upper limit is won by Intel) means that for the most part, its where the poor man's dollar should be spent.

I for one will be sticking with AMD, and look forward to my Phenom II X4 / M4A-79T / Radeon 4870 X2 arriving in early August

 

I'm guessing I'm being referenced by 3.9 on stock cooling?

Awesome chip, awesome board, and I'm running super-tight timings for mine, gonna try some higher latencies and faster nb/htt soon.

 

There's not really "stock cooling" with AMD. Actually I'm testing ANOTHER Domino ALC - this one performs well. The advantage of the Domino with AM2/3 CPUs is that it doesnt impede the memory slots like a lot of heatpiped coolers do. That and others were being used for Core i7 testing by Custom

 

Nice OC review. Good to see some overclocked comparisons vs high clock Wolfie and similarly clocked quad.

I've had my 720 for nearly 2 months but have yet to get and dirty in the BIOS, once I get back on water i'll start to play.

 

How does the Q6600 compare to something like a Q8300 clock for clock? As 6600s are starting to get scarce I'd have thought that might be a better comparison for those buying new now.

Edit: having said that, I suppose the 7.5x multiplier would put a lot of strain on the motherboard, you'd need 500FSB to start pushing 6600-capable speeds.

 

Nice review but weak conclusions. According to these comparisons, an overclocked X3 720 beats an overclocked E7500 in most applications, more importantly in games. There is no reason to pick the E7500.
X3 720 is not a direct competitor for Q6600, E8400 and E8500 should be included in the tests.

 

Thank you very much for a bench of Overclocked Intel vs overclocked AMD.....and NOT using 800x600 resolutions ...

I have always wondered if it was worth going for a heavy overclocked Intel or AMD, and subsystem testing may not be as fast, but in games at "normal" resolutions were never shown.

At least this way, we know that an oveclocked AMD isn't that far behind an Intel overclocked machine.
AMD wins with the price, whichever way you go....

Thanks again, a great article...

 

This article compares the Q8400 vs PII 940, they had a bit of a wimpy OC on the Intel, people have got a Q8300 to over 3.5 GHz.
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc.aspx?i=3559

 

I disagree. The Q6600 setup is £10 more than the 720 BE, and I'd buy the E7500 over E8400 because cache doesn't make that much difference. However I do take on the criticism that a high clocked dual core isn't worth buying now so much.

 

I've heard that there's a couple of motherboards that are allowing the supposedly disabled 4th core in the PII X3 series to be enabled. US-based store NewEgg has an ASRock motherboard that claims this. Only $69US for the 780GMH AM2+. I wonder what the capability of the disabled core is. Only scanned this article, but looks like each core can be clocked independently?

 

Oh yea I forgot to mention about this. The boards we've used haven't been able to do this, but obviously some people have got specific boards/BIOS combination's to allow it. Whether the 4th core works is debatable though.

Each core can be clocked independently - but you have to use the AMD OverDrive software - BIOS' generally don't allow it.