Taking the AMD Phenom II X3 720 Black Edition for a spin

[Gomeler]

I'm swamped with reviews and school work but last night I spent ~90 minutes to test my 720 Black Edition. I was told this chip was a monster so before testing with LN2 this weekend I figure I should spend a few minutes testing it under the cascade.

CPU: AMD Phenom II X3 720 Black Edition
MB: MSI 790GX-G65(review inbound, don't tell Nathan I used it )
DDR3: Corsair 1866C7 Dominator GT (review also inbound =\)
GPU: XFX GTX 285 Black Edition
PSU: Corsair HX1000
HDD: ACARD 9010 DDR2 Ram-drive
OS: Windows XP Service Pack 2
Cooling: 2 stage cascade, evap @ -94C

PiFast

spi-32m-5160MHz.gif

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SuperPi 1M

spi-1m-5163MHz.gif

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Super Pi 32M

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You'll notice these benchmarks were all done at the same frequency. The next multiplier jump was unstable with even PiFast and I only wanted to use 1.55vCPU for these initial tests. With 1.7v or so I could have benched stable around 5280MHz I believe. These initial results bode well for the upcoming LN2 testing. Let's hope for 6GHz

[GI-JOE]

Aww I'm telling!

[Major_A]

Out of curiosity did you try unlocking the 4th core? I have a friend coming over after he gets off work and I'm putting his computer together with this CPU. Is it better to find the overclock the old fashioned way (i.e. FSB adjustments) or simply playing with the multiplier?

[pwcmed]

Out of curiosity did you try unlocking the 4th core? I have a friend coming over after he gets off work and I'm putting his computer together with this CPU. Is it better to find the overclock the old fashioned way (i.e. FSB adjustments) or simply playing with the multiplier?

I was thinking the same thing.

[Gomeler]

Out of curiosity did you try unlocking the 4th core? I have a friend coming over after he gets off work and I'm putting his computer together with this CPU. Is it better to find the overclock the old fashioned way (i.e. FSB adjustments) or simply playing with the multiplier?

sadly this chip doesn't unlock, otherwise it would be even more awesome. On air-cooling I would say adjust the HTT speed first to find roughly what the max frequency of the cores are. Once you know the max frequency then you can find the best combination of CPU multiplier and HTT speed to achieve your CPU speed and also achieve the DDR2 speed and northbridge speed you desire.

[Major_A]

So basically... Find roughly the max FSB then play with the multiplier? I'm not looking to find the max overclock here, seeing as I want it to be stable and I won't have that much time with the system.

Any magic voltage settings that I should know about? I haven't overclocked an AMD processor since my old Opteron 170.

[Gomeler]

So basically... Find roughly the max FSB then play with the multiplier? I'm not looking to find the max overclock here, seeing as I want it to be stable and I won't have that much time with the system.

Any magic voltage settings that I should know about? I haven't overclocked an AMD processor since my old Opteron 170.

Ahh ok, then just stick with the default 200MHz HTT speed. This way you can just overclock with the half multipliers, 100MHz a jump. I'd say somewhere in between 3600MHz and 3900MHz are the average air overclocks on the core and 2700MHz to 2800MHz on the northbridge with these chips. You can also be a bit liberal with the voltages compared to Intel chips, I have been using 1.45vCPU and 1.375vNB along with 1.71vDIMM using DDR3. I've seen people using upwards of 2.3vDIMM 24/7 with DDR2 so I imagine I could go higher with the vDIMM but these sticks just don't need it.

In the images above you can see what I was talking about, I found a combination of CPU multiplier and HTT speed that resulted in close to the max speed for this chip while letting me get my memory and northbridge at the speeds I wanted with the dividers available to me.

[Major_A]

Thanks for the info. I'll see how it clocks when I get it put together.

[kappage]

WOW that is an awesome clock!

[jedihobbit]

Have any advise for one that doesn't have the "latest and greatest"?

Currently my Biostar 790GX XE / 720BE / TWIN2X4096-8500C5DF will only do 3.6GHz (18 x 200) "stable" (several hour runs of Prime and OCCT).

However have managed a couple of S & G runs of SPi (8M) at the following settings.........

&