Need help picking AMD Phenom II X4 955 BE

Friend of mine is donating an AM3 Motherboard to me and I need to pick up the best version of this chip possible for overclocking. Poked around with search but couldn't draw any conclusions. Board is a ASUS M4A79T Deluxe AM3 DDR3 AMD 790FX ATX AMD Motherboard. Originally used AMD Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition Deneb 3.2GHz Socket AM3 125W Quad-Core Processor HDZ955FBGIBOX. Are there steppings with this CPU and if so what should I look for for OC? My current set up is an EPOX 9NPA ULtra with a Opteron 1.8Ghz (165 I believe) running 2.8 on air. Looks like new board allows many more OC settings.

I dont know about steppings but my old 955 hit 4gz. 3.8 eas easy, then that last 200 mhz was a pain lol. What speed are you looking to get, most 955s can hit 3.6-3.8 pretty easy.

The board is rated for CPUs with TDP of 125watt or less. So the CPU compatibility list at ASUS is a valuable tool. List says you can run any 125Watt TDP cpu up to and including an 1090T or 1100T which have become scarcer than dinosaurs in retail sales channels.

So if he finds a cheap 1045/55 Thuban hexacore, then he has to overclock on the FSB/CPU Frequency and the 790 chipset boards are not as good for that or is said so.

I would go to my favorite CPU seller and get a 955BE wiith unlocked upward multiplier and be done with it. No where over here have I seen a list of batch numbers of 955BE's so that is not found here and CPU sellers normally are not going to look for that batch number before making a sale anyway. They are not going to open a box and look and then have to close box so any customer does not think he got a used cpu.

I reread his post and he does not tell us if the board is DDR3 or not so if DDR2, I surely would not want to have to try and FSB clock a lesser Thuban like the 1045/55's.

If its Phenom II your looking for? go C3 stepping, which is the latest one.

It also depends on what he's planing on doing with it. an x6 obviously has 6 cores and will be overkill unless he's using a lot of very multi threaded apps, or if like me he likes to play DX11 games while recoding a BlueRay movie and listing to music through WMP all at the same time, in other words a lot of multitasking.

Something AMD's with lots of cores are pretty good at.

I reread his post and he does not tell us if the board is DDR3 or not so if DDR2, I surely would not want to have to try and FSB clock a lesser Thuban like the 1045/55's.

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Board is DDR3. 3.8 Ghz overclock is probably good enough. 4 cores are plenty for my apps.

In the old 939 days 2Ghz of memory was usually the sweet spot. What amount of memory should I consider for OC'ing. Min-Max range a help. Not a serious gamer but heavy realtime database look ups and updates are strong possibility.

I have the same board with 8GB of ram. You need to watch what ram you buy. Compatibility issues could arise with the wrong ram. I'm using Adata XPG gaming ram and no issues at all. The M4A79T Deluxe is a sweet board. I didn't have much trouble getting a 980 BE to 4.1ghz with trents help. Get a 955 BE or 965 BE and see what it will do. Newegg has a 965 BE for $104.99 and free shipping.

c3 955 black will do you well, mine runs @ 3.7 on stock voltages and multi alone, 3.8 is pretty stable, but after i had to RMA my mobo i never pushed hard again so it just sits @ 3.7 on multi, maybe ill try pushing it again soon now that my moo seems fine...

Thanks for all the help. I've decided to go with a 965 BE. Knew this forum would help as always. When I get around to other items I'll check in again.

if your going with ANY 9xx go with a 955.... your wasting money on the 965....