We don't have a thousand dollars for your XE thank-you-very-much. The 720 is a fantastic choice for cost efficient overclocking and it's a corporate strategy Intel should take on board. What we really like is the fact that AMD officially supports the majority of overclockers - and not just those with more money than sense - by releasing inexpensive Black Edition parts. The Phenom II X3 720 has hit a great price (even Intel's cheapest quad-core, the Q8200 is £141 - £20 more expensive for a far lower 2.33GHz clock) and with DDR2 it certainly holds its own against the more expensive Intel competition and even other AMD CPUs in many of the tests. Unless you're after some extreme overclocking or all of the applications you use take advantage of no more than two cores, we do think it's probably a better option than the E8400 at £136.07 or the E7500 at £124.19, as the Phenom II X3 720 beats the even higher clocked Core 2 Duo E8500 in quite a few of our tests. While it doesn't beat the £25 more expensive and quite frankly bulletproof Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600, it's a great alternative option for those whose budgets lie in the sub £150 bracket, rather than around £200 and upwards. It's inexpensive and it balances the need for many core, improving performance in things like video encoding and also in applications that rely mostly on higher frequencies. While we fobbed off the triple-core processors when AMD released the first of them based on the ill-fated 65nm Agena core because their clock speeds were just too low, AMD has now readdressed this issue and at 2.8GHz with an unlocked multiplier the 720 is a great choice. People have often ignored the very capable Intel Core 2 Duo E8200/8400 in favour of the Q6600 because they want a decent overclock and quad-core resources but until heavily overclocked, the Q6600 isn't as fast as the higher clocked dual-core chips in a lot of instances and, for the most part, clock speed is still an overwhelming factor for general system performance. In our opinion, this latest batch of new CPUs from AMD should really only be considered as AM2+ parts for now. We'll continue to focus on AM2+ products for now until AMD releases a core refresh or DDR3 drops so low it's impossible to ignore.
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Investing in an AM3 CPU also means limiting your upgrade options - what's the point in buying 4GB now and "cheaper" 4GB later when the outcome is a slower than DDR2, yet still more expensive pair of DDR3 modules?ĪMD's AM3 update is more in parallel with DDR3 for Core 2 CPUs - it's there if you want it, rather than being a commanding must-have upgrade. Upgrading and having to drop back to 4GB is unlikely to be on the cards for these consumers - especially if it's an upgrade to a slower system because of higher DDR3 latencies. In our book, 8GB of RAM is still overkill unless you have some extreme demands, but we recognise it's become increasingly popular for DDR2 owners to drop in another 4GB because memory is so cheap.
This, combined with the fact memory companies in the "good times" saw very little money from DDR2, the factors are in favour of DDR3 prices remaining higher for a while yet and AMD's contribution is hardly going to increase consumer demand - the final factor in this equation.
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However, with the economic recession in full effect, companies like Qimonda have already filed for insolvency and have been bailed out (all the cool kids are doing it these days it seems). There will be an inevitable drop in DDR3 prices in 2009 and it should become more mainstream. It needs to be a significant performance bump in order to incentivise people to upgrade, bringing down DDR3 prices further and actually generating a performance gap. As much as we'd love to big-up the new socket and latest memory support, at the end of the day it's more of a formal increment to keep up with the changing times and, even then, DDR3 is still something to shy away from.Īs it stands, in our opinion the DDR3 memory controller simply isn't good enough - AMD needs to push for 1,600MHz memory support and 8GB of DDR3 (all four slots) as well. Value and ConclusionsWithout even reviewing the product, after being told at the initial briefing that DDR3 performance accounted for only a five percent improvement, we knew we weren't going to see much more than an evolutionary bump for AM3.
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