AMD AM3 Phenom II 720 Black Edition CPU

AMD has just released five new AM3 (938-pin) socketed versions of its latest Phenom II processors.

There are five new models in all, with two X3 triple cores, the Phenom II X3 720 Black Edition and Phenom II X3 710 and three X4 quad cores, the Phenom II X4 810, 910 and 805. It’s the X3 720 Black Edition we’re looking at here.

The AM3s are built on a 45nm process and have a 128KB L1 cache (64KB of L1 instruction and 64KB of L1 data) per core, plus 512KB of L2 cache per core for a total of 2MB of L2 cache for the X4 quad core and 1.5MB for the triple-cored X3. The X4 810 and 805 have 4MB of L3 cache while all the others have 6MB. The maximum Thermal Design Power of all five processors is 95W.

All the processors have an integrated 128-bit memory controller which can be configured into dual 64-bit channels for simultaneous read/writes. It supports DDR2 memory up to 1,066MHz (PC2-8500) and DDR3 up to 1,333MHz (PC3-10600). The Hyper Transport 3.0 link supports one 16-bit link up to 4GHz (full duplex), for a total processor bandwidth of up to 33.1Gbytes/sec.

The Phenom II X4 810 offers some stiff competition to Intel’s Core 2 Quad and Duo ranges, but when it comes to performance it’s overshadowed by the X3 720 Black Edition. It has excellent overclocking potential as its processors have unlocked core multipliers. We found it very easy to overclock and it can run at high speeds just on an air cooler. We had it running stable at 3.7GHz, an increase of 900MHz, just by increasing the multiplier in AMD’s Overdrive utility from 13x to 18.5x and increasing the CPU voltage to 1.53V, cooled via an Akasa AK-876 heatpipe cooler.

For around £120 the Black Edition is a very well priced and easily overclocked CPU.