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AMD Phenom II X3 720 Black Edition Review & Overclocking - PAGE 1
William Henning - Like +my favouritesYesterday we published our review of the new Phenom II X4 810 - it is a great little chip, and you can read that review here - but today it is time to follow up with our review of the Phenom II X3 720 Black Edition.
AMD is squarely targeting the enthusiast crowd with this chip: the unlocked multiplier, along with the stated intent to price it similarly to the Core 2 Duo E8400, both make it clear that they are gunning for the overclocking crowd.
Although I am definitely part of the overclocking crowd, the analysis of the benchmark result charts in this review will concentrate on the stock performance of the Phenom II X3 720 BE versus the stock performance of the Core 2 Duo E8400.
AMD is betting that having a third core, the Phenom II X720 Black Edition will be able to overcome the advantage of a 200MHz higher clock rate, and the 50% greater integer instruction issue rate.
Let's quickly recap the newly announced parts from yesterday:
Today, AMD is introducing new, more value oriented, Phenom II processors:
- $175 AMD Phenom™ II X4 810 @ 2.6GHz with 4MB of L3 cache
- $145 AMD Phenom™ II X3 720 Black Edition @ 2.8GHz with 6MB of L3 cache
- $125 AMD Phenom™ II X3 710 @ 2.6GHz with 6MB of L3 cache
- $n/a AMD Phenom™ II X4 910 @ 2.6GHz with 6MB of L3 cache (Available in tray only)
- $n/a AMD Phenom™ II X4 805 @ 2.5GHz with 4MB of L3 cache (Available in tray only)
The current prices are:
- $145 Phenom II X3 720 (AMD announced price)
- $165 Core 2 Duo E8400 (at NewEgg)
The Phenom II X3 720 starts the contest with a potential $20 price advantage on the processor alone - and more if you use a P45 motherboard and DDR3 memory for the testing (like we will). So how will the Phenom II X3 720 Black Edition stack up?
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As for gaming, why not run them for more realistic resolutions and varying qualities, other than the lowest? I get you were trying to compare CPU processing capability, but as long as the CPU can keep up in feeding the GPU, who cares about excess processing?
Anyways, it was a good article...I hope they hit the e-shelves soon.
Also if you are more into rendering, three cores beats two.
Basically, its an option - and having choices leads to more competition, that lowers prices.
I run two types of gaming tests:
- older games at low resolution, little eye candy to evalute the processor for the ability to "feed" a video card; basically a pure cpu test
- new games at high resolution, high aa/af - ie the Crysis, DMC4, WIC tests, to see how much / little impact the CPU has at 1024 (little eye candy), 1024/1280/1600 (high eyecandy aa/af)
The idea of the second set is to see how it would perform for a gamer; realistically if gaming is your area of interest, look at the 1600x1200 high aa/af results in order to make a buying decision.
I try to have relevant data for all types of readers :-)
but when its other way round, the numbers are either notmentioned with words such as 'ouch' or maybe modestly describe as e840 beats by a mere 22 %.
NOT FIR
How do you outfit two cpu's with comletely different components and then put them head to head?
We understand cpu's made by different manufacturers and you cant use the same board. But why didnt you use same components for other items?
i.e. RAM, HDD, you could have also equiped AMD with DDR3 board and ram.
This test is flawed and pointless, you may as well never have done this test.
Same problem all over the internet, they are equiping AMD with DDR2 and not 3, whats the point!
All AMD processors are reviewed on the same motherboard, whenever it's possible of course. Same thing for Intel processors. Also, for both AMD and Intel reviews we are using the same memory, video card and hard drive.
Since earlier this year, I am the main reviewer for Intel, while Carl, aka The_Smith, is doing AMD hardware. If you have any comments or suggestions, feel free to PM one of us. We'll be happy to make our reviews better to our readers!
Just FYI, we'll be making a couple changes in our benchmarking suite and switching to Windows 7 x64 as soon as possible.
-Carlos
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