AMD's Phenom II x3 740 Black Edition - an $89 monster?

[ragejg]

Available at the Egg.

Wow!



I know, it's only 200 mhz faster than the x3 720 Black which has become one of the most respected gaming CPUs out there, but maybe the supply has gotten low... plus, hey, AMD still has to speed-bin some chips, and getting these to us at $89?

Awesome! I mean, hell, look at x3 720 benchmarks when THAT was released. Even though it was not too long ago, it was still around February of '09, and as far as gaming was concerned, there weren't too many games out there that would handle more than two cores if they could.

Fast forward to now, and there are a lot more games and applications that do so. ...And the cool part is that the tri-cores are often approaching and sometimes matching (and sometimes surpassing) the four AND six-core offerings in gaming when set up right (and sometimes overclocked).

To me, the Athlon II and Phenom II x3 CPUs really get competitive starting at 2.7ghz. I had an AII x3 425 for quite a while, and ran it at stock with a stock-clocked HD 4850. Next to that rig was a 720BE unlocked to x4 running at 3.1ghz, with an overclocked HD 4870. It would seem like there'd be some noticeable differences in gaming performance. Not really. Both rigs felt like very fast and snappy pixel-pushing machines, and this was observed while playing games that stress CPU heavily like Bad Company 2 and America's Army v3 and using the multithreaded image manipulation program Paint.NET.

Oh yeah, we're talking about AMD's NEW x3 Phenom, not their old stuff! Well, suffice to say, even at stock speeds this 3ghz x3 with some L3 cache should prove to be a very fast CPU. How will it overclock? Will it unlock? Newegg user reviews indicate that this chip unlocks and overclocks just like its older sibling the 720BE.

So, a CPU that is essentially a tick faster than a 720BE with the same unlock/overclock potential, and that Black Edition Coolness factor... for $89? Big Win in my book.

If you're in the market for an AMD AM2+/AM3 CPU, this seems to be a heck of a bang-for-the-buck. If I didn't already have this x6 sitting in my rig, I'd likely pick one up.

Discuss!!

Looks nice. I'm going with the 6 core AMD soon. I just need to get a really nice AM3 board - Any ideas?

[Maverick123w]

Wow... serious bang for yer buck there!

[ragejg]

Originally Posted by slaWter

If AMD would have good mainboards with decent chipsets, I might consider them for some builds.
CPUs aren't the problem, in my opinion. But Intel has the upper hand when it comes to chipsets. Those are the real stars, not the i3-i7 CPUs

AMD 770, 760G, 780G, and so far nforce 980a have been great chipsets for me.

Though AMD 770 wouldn't unlock cores, I was able to overclock my x3 720 to 3.5ghz, and was able to keep that speed even after removing the mosfet-sinks I had applied. The onboard audio on the Asus M3A was also really nice, and acoustically matched my HT setup better than my Audigy 2 ZS.

AMD 760G had reliable RAID 0 performance, a bunch of good USB ports, nice DDR2-1200 support which I took advantage of, onboard video that could play Portal, and it allowed me to unlock and lightly overclock an x3 720BE... and it also ran my x6 quite well when I first got it. I built an ASROCK 760G board for a family member, with an x3 8600B OCed to 2.5ghz and TLB disabled, and it's providing them with a great HTPC/media/gaming system similar to what I do in my house.

My 780G board would have been great if I had been less aggressive with voltages. I'm certain that I would have gotten a reliable 4ghz out of my x6 1055t, and it would have run fairly cool. I think I just allowed NB voltages to get out of hand, and am lucky other parts didn't fry. ... This board also had good RAID performance and an awesome onboard sound setup.

... And now I have my first NVIDIA chipset-equipped AM"X" board, with an nforce 980a. So far it's the most feature-packed motherboard I've ever had, with great mosfet-NB-SB cooling, eSATA, flexible RAID/AHCI support, and a plethora of overclocking options.


What do you not like about AMD motherboards, slawter?

[Maverick123w]

Originally Posted by ragejg

AMD 770, 760G, 780G, and so far nforce 980a have been great chipsets for me.

Though AMD 770 wouldn't unlock cores, I was able to overclock my x3 720 to 3.5ghz, and was able to keep that speed even after removing the mosfet-sinks I had applied. The onboard audio on the Asus M3A was also really nice, and acoustically matched my HT setup better than my Audigy 2 ZS.

AMD 760G had reliable RAID 0 performance, a bunch of good USB ports, nice DDR2-1200 support which I took advantage of, onboard video that could play Portal, and it allowed me to unlock and lightly overclock an x3 720BE... and it also ran my x6 quite well when I first got it. I built an ASROCK 760G board for a family member, with an x3 8600B OCed to 2.5ghz and TLB disabled, and it's providing them with a great HTPC/media/gaming system similar to what I do in my house.

My 780G board would have been great if I had been less aggressive with voltages. I'm certain that I would have gotten a reliable 4ghz out of my x6 1055t, and it would have run fairly cool. I think I just allowed NB voltages to get out of hand, and am lucky other parts didn't fry. ... This board also had good RAID performance and an awesome onboard sound setup.

... And now I have my first NVIDIA chipset-equipped AM"X" board, with an nforce 980a. So far it's the most feature-packed motherboard I've ever had, with great mosfet-NB-SB cooling, eSATA, flexible RAID/AHCI support, and a plethora of overclocking options.


What do you not like about AMD motherboards, slawter?

It doesn't say Intel

[ragejg]

Originally Posted by slaWter

For example:

-no SLI support unless you settle for the worst of all chipsets: nVidia
-internal GPUs are ATI based so that usually means troublesome video acceleration but that only applies for HTPC tasks
-not really good SATA controllers, they got better but are still not as good as the Intel controllers
-AMD's south bridges were always very dodgy


Maybe it's just me but in my opinion the motherboard is the most important part in a computer and therefore a mediocre AMD chipset just kills the possibility of using the pretty decent AMD CPUs.

Interesting points, definitely...

I guess as a person who has always tried to do more with less, I don't mind most of the niggles you listed, especially since properly configured AMD builds hold their own with Intel setups in almost any situation.

[nekrosoft13]

Originally Posted by ragejg

Interesting points, definitely...

I guess as a person who has always tried to do more with less, I don't mind most of the niggles you listed, especially since properly configured AMD builds hold their own with Intel setups in almost any situation.

they can't when you try to task the motherboard to the max

i have amd 890 board in the server with every sata port filled and pci-e sata expansion. when i/o request get really busy, sata controller starts to choke.

data transfer gets erratic, doesn't happen on my intel build when it had all sata ports used up.

that is the sacrifice that you pay when you go the cheap route. ati on board gpu doesn't bother me in the server, just don't try to update drivers for it, other wise is fine, once installed leave it alone.

on the HTPC, the on-board GPU kept having issues with certain h264 files when hardware acceleration was on, nvidia GT240 fixed that up.

[Maverick123w]

Originally Posted by slaWter

For example:

-no SLI support unless you settle for the worst of all chipsets: nVidia
-internal GPUs are ATI based so that usually means troublesome video acceleration but that only applies for HTPC tasks
-not really good SATA controllers, they got better but are still not as good as the Intel controllers
-AMD's south bridges were always very dodgy


Maybe it's just me but in my opinion the motherboard is the most important part in a computer and therefore a mediocre AMD chipset just kills the possibility of using the pretty decent AMD CPUs.

- I agree no native sli support blows
- I recently had my 470 out of my machine for the past week because I've been busy with school and haven't had time to game and didn't want to waste power and the on-board 4290 gave me 0 issues.
- Both my drives produce above their maximum rated throughputs so no issues for me
- Nice blanket statement with 0 support or proof.

[StoNer]

Originally Posted by slaWter

Well the USB issues with previous generation AMD south bridges come to mind.

What kind of issues?!?! Oh god! Is my computar going to fry???

[darkrider01]

I just used one of these chips with the ASUS M4A77D motherboard with 4GB of Patriot DDR2-1066 RAM for an upgrade for my father. I am very impressed with the setup. I grabbed a cheap Rosewill cooler for it. The 4th core unlocked and would even overclock easily to 3.4GHz. I didn't attempt anything faster than 3.4, but it's prime95 stable at 3.4. It's an incredible value to get that processor for $89 and get the equivalent of a $160 processor.