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

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CPUs Master
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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.
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spentshells said:
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.

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.

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.

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.
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