Phenom II X3 720 Black Edition tested

Donanimhaber has laid its hands on a 45nm triplecore AMD processor, the Phenom X3 720 Black Edition. As the name suggests, the chip is from the latest generation and features an unlocked multiplier. AMD will introduce two types of triple-cores, being a Phenom II X3 version with 6 MB shared L3 cache and an Athlon X3 version which does not have the L3 cache.

The three cores of the Phenom II X3 720 BE are clocked at 2.8 GHz which makes for a total TDP of 95 Watt. In theory, this means that the new CPUs run more economically than the first Phenom II X4 920 and 940 versions, which bear a 125 Watt TDP. The new triplecores will be socket AM3-based, supporting both DDR2 and DDR3 memory. 

  First Phenom II triplecore

Donanimhaber has tested AMD's new triplecore in several synthetic and real-world benchmarks such as Cinebench x64, PCMark Vantage, Fritz Chess 9, Everest, Pifast and the game FarCry 2. A comparison between DDR2-1066 and DDR3-1600 shows that the differences are only marginal. Only in the Everest benchmark clear differences can be seen. 

The overclocking potential of the new 45nm triplecore was not too bad either, with a Sunbeamtech Core Contact Freeze cooling block on the chip, it was possible to increase the clock frequency to 3700 MHz, an overclock of almost 32%. The Phenom II X3 series will be released by the end of the first quarter, the price of the Black Edition version will be 140 Euro. 

The drie cores at 3,7 GHz with aircooling