The 720's finally showed up at the Egg last Thursday and the UPS man
delivered it a couple hours ago. Being my first Phenom I was somewhat
confused by the newly unlocked BIOS options on my Biostar 790GX mobo and
it kept spontaneously re-booting when I first fired it up. I thought at
first it was because I had all four DIMM slots filled but it ran fine
with my old CPU and then I looked at the VID and it was set at 1.14v
which is seriously low. I bumped it up to the next tic and now its
running fine and so far stable. I also fiddled with other confusing
settings so I'm not 100% that it was the low VID that was the problem.
Anywho, I wanted ask for any body's input about a curious thing that I
have been pondering for an hour over. I hope I'm not violating list
policy by sending an attachment and if I am then please accept my
apology. Take a look at this Jpeg screen capture and tell me what you
think of it. Thanks!
Stan Zaske wrote:
Check it out guys, I think this is the best bang for the buck to
upgrade my old 5400+ BE. :-)
http://www.neoseeker.com/Articles/Hardware/Reviews/phenom_ii_x3_720be/
*snip*
I think the reason AMD targeted the E8400 is due to the third core,
the Phenom II X3 720 BE running at 2.8GHz actually outperforms the
Core 2 Duo E8400 running at 3GHz for rendering; thus supporting AMD's
marketing strategy that three cores are better than two.
That strategy is absolutely true - if the software can support it. If
LAME and TMPGEnc had supported more threads, the Phenom II X3 720
would also have beaten the Core 2 Duo E8400 for them. Fortunately,
more multi-threaded codecs are becoming available, and I will soon
look for one for benchmarking purposes.
What the benchmarks don't show you is that with three cores, a system
will multi-task more smoothly. For example, using a Phenom II X3 720
for a small server should result in better web server and SQL server
performance, as the extra core could be take advantage of.
I think the AMD Phenom II X3 720 Black Edition is a great chip - and
it is especially good for people who like to tinker and overclock, as
with a cheap 780G based motherboard and DDR2 you can put together a
nice fast overclocked system for significantly less than it would cost
to put together a nicely overclocked E8400 system. Yes, for some
benchmarks the E8400 won - but for some others, it was the triple core
720BE that shined.
