Should I upgrade phenom ii x3 720 to x4 960T?

[akmchicken]

I'm looking to upgrade my CPU that is now about 2-3 years old. My motherboard supports the new FX CPUs too, but I read that it was worst then the phenoms for gaming. Will I see much difference going from my old phenom ii x3 720 to phenom ii x4 960T for mostly gaming?

 

[rolli59]

You will not see much of a difference since most games only utilize up to 3 cores. Difference in clock speed will give a little bump and the 960T would be a little future proving. Both CPU's should though overclock well and your X3 possibly unlock a core if you have not already tried.

 

[sosofm]

For gaming maybe a little improvement the biggest improvement is in multitasking.

 

[Raidur]

+1 rolli

OP: Are you overclocked? What GPU(s) do you use?

 

[dleavitt]

I'd spend a few bucks more for a 955. Higher base clock and lots of OC headroom.

EDIT: I'm operating under the assumption that your MB supports 125W TDP processor.

 

[spentshells]

The easy answer is no, overclock the cpu as far as possible and as rolli mentioned try to unlock the last core. What motherboard do you have ?

 

[akmchicken]

The easy answer is no, overclock the cpu as far as possible and as rolli mentioned try to unlock the last core. What motherboard do you have ?

I can't unlock the last core as the system would not boot, but I have my CPU overclocked to 3.4ghz right now. My motherboard is the Asus Sabertooth 990FX. I got this motherboard because I was originally planning on getting the 6 or 8 core bulldozer CPUS, but read a lot of comments about how phenom II is much better than them.

My GPU is the 5850 1gb. I plan on waiting for AMD 7000 or nvidia 600 series cards for a few months before upgrading this part.

 

[spentshells]

When you tried to unlock the core was your system overclocked ?
Have you tried adding more voltage when using the base 2.8GHZ clock before unlocking the core ?

 

[akmchicken]

I'm a beginner overclocker, but when I tried to unlock it I had it on default clock speeds and I believe I did increase the voltage a little bit. It wouldn't boot up and I had to remove the battery on the motherboard to reset it back to default settings.

 

[rolli59]

If it does not unlock then it makes the upgrade viable. The 960T is a 2 core disabled X6 and is a 95watt CPU with good overclocking potential.

 

[aldagoods]

I went from a 740be to the 960t and it is definitely noticeable. Much easier to overclock than the 740. about a 20% improvement on benchmarks. It runs cold and doesnt use a lot of voltage. I was able to unlock 5/6, normally just running 4 cores at 3.6g with no problems. With a small voltage increase, [to 1.35] and just raising the multiplier, it runs at 4.0g stable. Good chip. Try disabling single cores, my 6th wouldnt allow it to boot, but Core #4 [#'s 0-5] was good enabling 5 cores. Steal at the price.

 

[Chipbuster]

I made the switch from an X3 to the X6 1100T recently, and I don't really see all that big of a change in gaming on Source engine, although to be fair, Source tends to be a single-thread, CPU limited engine. I have yet to test the core out for video rendering, but I think it'll be a lot, lot faster.