Phenom 9600 - Good Pentium D Upgrade?

Hey all, my buddy has the following system:

Pentium D 2.8Ghz
2GB DDR2
7300GT
1440x900
He loves gaming, but it's obvious that the 7300GT and PD2.8 just doesn't cut it, especially at 1440x900.
Also, his motherboard blows. It only has 2 DIMM slots, and a PCI-E 4x. Also, it doesn't do above 800Mhz FSB... lol
He's not picky on graphics, but he really wants to upgrade. He's getting 20FPS in CoD2, even at 1024x768.

I saw this awesome combo on newegg:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Comb [...] mbo.182233

Phenom 9600 + AMD 770 board - $135

He'll probably combine it with an HD4830 in a bit. All he needs is enough to run CoD2 and CoD4 @ 1440x900 High Settings, 2xAA 4xAF. He'll also be doing some minor video editing/encoding. (SD stuff)
Is this a good upgrade from a Pentium D 2.8Ghz? I know about the TLB bug, but in a lot of memory intensive programs, the Phenom's actually perform pretty decent.

EDIT: Also, I believe he has oldschool DDR2-533. He has no interest (nor the technical know-how) to overclock. Will DDR2-533 work with the Phenom 9600? I forget how AMD memory/processor stuff works these days.

I just saw that like 30 seconds ago. lol. I'm gonna recommend that to him also. He's kinda tight on cash right now, but good recommendation .

I rolled onto a Phenom 9600BE combo and it's worked at 2.6GHz like a happy little camper for the last 90 days or so.

If yer bud is going to spend an extra $30 or so dollars I'd suggest snagging the Gigabyte 790x (with sb750) instead of the 9950BE.

Much better mobo, possible Crossfire down the road and should run that Phenom 9600BE at 2.5-2.6GHz at stock volts (and 95w) with no problemos ...

Settin' that cpu multi to 13 almost strained my finger


edit: I fergit. For the most part (primarily with the 9600 but it sometimes helps with the 9950) unganging the memory controller will give yah a touch more stability ...

The sb700 will hold you back. The sb750 improved PLL timings and has the '6 magic pins' which allow an additional 2oo-400MHz OC with BE procs.





edit: I (in a slacker kind of way) tried to find some links for you ... but pretty much Failed ...

Here's one ---->>
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/ [...] s#t1828390

Yes it would be fine and that board is on Gigabytes list over boards that support Phenom II

I am aware of this chip, and thought about it too, but my buddy will be doing quite a bit of video encoding, which already uses (with the right codecs) most of the cores. Also, he intends this CPU to last him a very long time (3+ years), and I figured the 9950 would be his best option for $140.... if future games are to make more use of extra cores.

For 140 i'd rather go with the PII X3 720...

I'd also rather go with the 720, but then I'd also be thinking about overclocking it, and maybe getting an ASRock board to try and unlock the 4th core. Anyway the Penom II architecture is a little better clock for clock than the original Phenom architecture. Also the 720 is faster and runs cooler, so while it may suffer a little in video encoding it will generally be faster in games than the 9950 and you won't have to worry about the heat as much.

Yeah, I mean that should be fine... the P1 is no overclocker, but we've already established that's not important, hehe. In any case from what I've seen the 9950 is fairly similar to a Q6600 (without the Q's great overclockability of course) ... not great, but not awful.