720BE OCed vs 960T, Upgrade comparison

i was feeling like my 720BE was holding me back a bit in my games and such and it had hit a major wall at about 3.5Ghz that took ALOT of juice to get by, like going from 1.4 to 1.65v to get any where past 3.5Ghz, so for a long while i sat at 3.5Ghz with some occasional funky ness and i got tired of it so i ordered a 960T.....after waiting about 5 weeks for them to come back in stock.

so heres a comparison between my older 720BE and the new 960T

i forgot to do a CPUz shot before i swapped processors so info on the 720BE:

ran 3.5Ghz obtained at 250 x 14 @ 1.44V, NB was @ 1.25v as was the HT bus
HT bus was running 2250Mhz it maxed load temp at arround 38C using OCCT's default test.

the 960T is stock of course @ 3.0Ghz and 1.3v (15 x 200) and of course the HT is at the usuall 2000Mhz, all stock voltages on any thing else processor related

the rest of the setup is:
Biostar TA890FXE Ver. 5
Scythe YASYA SCYS-1000
16Gigs Gskill Ripjaws 1333
Sapphire 5770 Vapor X running 915/1230
1 x 320Gb hitachi drive
1 x 1Tb Seagate drive
1 x DVD burner
OCZ SXS 600 watt PSU

the tests were 3dmark 11 and Vantage as well as Heaven and the benchmark in Dirt 3. may do more later might not, more interested in the differences between the 2 processors, kind of a then and now sort of thing.

all tests were run one right after another, no reboots between, it was boot, 3dmark tests, Heaven test (GL, 9, 10, 11) start steam, run dirt 3 test, shut down.

first up Heaven scores, ran all 4 tests, openGL to DX11 like this:


the results:


first off i think its odd how close they are, i honestly thought that the 720 would get more done despite 3 cores vs 4 cores because the bus was OCed but adding an extra core and a refined process of getting more done clock per clock put them both even. so a rana + 50Mhz more bus speed = zosma.

odd but this is only one test

the next is Dirt3, only ran the bench once on each:



dirt is an awsome looking game and still runs really really well at the same time, i thought i would have a hard time runnin this on the 720 but i didnt. i run the game to my liking, AA is usually off as well as the bloom and the other werid effects, shadows are low, models and cloth are high or ultra and reflections are high as well.

the odd thing is the 960T did do alot better and if you cant tell from the pic, alot of the bloom and AA and other such thing were back on for some reason. so not only did it do better, it did better with more goodies enabled.

this is one i will have to redo later.

next is 3dmark 11 & Vantage:



Similar sort of situation with the heaven benchmark, the 960T is just a tad bit faster than the 720 overclocked.

so far thats all i have but its a good inication that things take advantage of processors in different ways, the actual game really took off with the new processor where as the tests didnt do a whole lot. although if it were the 720BE with the 4th core unlocked running at 3Ghz i think the 960T would thump it because its showing that it can get more done clock per clock to me atleast.

i will try to run the 960T in a few different ways here in the near future to make further comparison, mabe disable one of the cores, run it as 3 like the 720 and match its speed and see what happens.

when i get to that who knows because i have to be out of this house by tuesday at 5pm. When i do get back to it i plan on running the 960T like i had said before as well as running it in its "turbo mode", OCing it to what i can get it to easily (probably 3.8 i think) see if it unlocks and if it does repeat stock, "turbo mode", and max OC.

some interesting results.



2 cores unlocked making 6 cores at 3.0Ghz specs are as they are still in the first post, wheres the bottle neck? video card i am thinking

similar results through out heaven bench and dirt 3, will complie that info and post it later

You put the 960T at 3.5Ghz and you will see a difference. CPU speed is still king over a few cores with 500Mhz less cpu speed.

After all those captures and get down to the end of the last group and I look at bottom of the post and n0 signature. Crap. Have to scroll all the way back up to first post to see what is being talked about.

Sigs are pretty easy. Signatures follow you in every post in the forum so your system information follows you and people know what is in the box.

Be logged in to the forum.

Across the top of the forum is a button shown as 'user cp'. Click that button.

On the page that loads are a list of options down the left side of the page.

Under the Settings & Options menu area is a Edit Signature listing. Click on that listing.

Clicking Edit Signature opens another page. In the middle of that page is where you Edit YOUR signature.

Enter your information there and at bottom of the window you are entering your signature is button for either Preview Signature or Save Signature. Do save and you will have your signature incorporated into the forum in each of your posts. Of course Preview Signature will let you see 'how' your signature would appear in the forum. But in the end the Save Signature must be clicked to save it to the forum.

You can look at my signature for a template of some good stuffz to put in one's own signature when seeking help.

Good luck man.

editing to fix this one.

the sig i have is way out of date with the 720 be, all of the system specs are in the first pot NOT IN A SIGNATURE but....near the top of the first post
that is all of the system specs minus the case of which its an enermax generic 50lb (by it self) huge steel case.

i'm not updating the signature because i am not done with overclocking unlocking and adding new parts, theres a 7870 on the way that will be here monday and 4.0Ghz is atleast a few weeks away if not longer.
no sence wading through all of the forum tags for solors and such to change things that will be changed later on

so to reiterate full system specs are near the top of the first post

Niku-Sama said:

top of first post, no sigs its out of date

Click to expand...

Out of date? I don't even see a signature be it out of or up to date. Give us an upated one then.

Ditto. The X3 720 is a crippled Deneb and the 960T is a crippled Thuban. Except for the core count I don't think there are any major architectural differences between Denebs and Thubans, just minor stepping kind of things that have mostly to do with power consumption. Given that and the fact that the kind of benchmarks you employed don't take much advantage of the extra core I would not expect to see much difference between the two CPUs in your tests, even if they were running at the same clock speed. The 960T will begin to separate when you begin to overclock it because you should be able to get it to 4.0 with good cooling and a decent board. And if you were comparing the two CPUs in AV rendering benchmarks like Cinebench or real world AV rendering apps like Handbrake that are truly multi-threaded you would also see a big separation.

there are more changes than you might think.

the 720 will do DDR2 and DDR3 where as the 960T only does DDR3 and the controller has been upgraded, HTT busses are faster theres alot of differences.
shoulda thought of something to do that wasnt games but thats all i really do on this thing, most of my hobbies involve old computer or old tech or new tech that doesent require much (like arduino)


i know there should have been more than a difference in various things, my cheesy windows score for the cpu went from 5.9 to 7.4...hard drive is still 5.9 though

Was the 720 a cut down PII 940?

Technically, I think all AM3/AM3+ CPUs will work with DDR2 since they are downwardly compatible with socket AM2+. The ICM covers both technologies. But socket AM2+ CPUs will not work on boards that use DDR3 ram because it was a later technology.

now i had asked that before of the T based processors and had been told before that it didnt have a DDR2 memory controller in it.

either way i have noticed a huge overhaul of the memory controller, this 960T plays nicer with my ram than the 720BE ever did, even at stock speeds.

Yeah, the IMC is stouter on the Thuban core and will typically play with 1600 ram, not that it makes any real performance difference when you go from 1333 to 1600. The current generation of AMD and Intels just don't need the extra bandwidth.