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FRONTPAGE AMD Phenom II X4 975 Black Edition Review

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Nice review Matt, do you reckon spending the extra on the 975 gets you enough headroom to make it worthwhile? Were the temps on the 975 any better?
 
whats up with the funky case these guys are coming in?

Its no twkr!
 
Nice review IMOG!

whats up with the funky case these guys are coming in?

Its no twkr!

Hahaha...that's for sure. TWKR got its own lockbox. ;) They're OEM and don't come with a cooler, so that's how they protect them.

It's better than the 1075T, which was in an empty 12-CPU tray (save the one CPU of course) and held together with packing straps.
 
Good review.

It almost seems superfluous with proc's like the Thubans out and even newer core tech on the way. The value that comes from this is in the form of knowing we have higher speed options for machines we don't want to overclock like critical systems and that it falls in a lower power envelope. For me my 3G proc would do 4G with an easy bump.
Thanks for opening that door.
 
Nice review Matt, do you reckon spending the extra on the 975 gets you enough headroom to make it worthwhile? Were the temps on the 975 any better?

I reckon it depends.

This was a really tough review for me, especially as I've gotten some great results from the 965 BE this 975 was up against... This 965 has the top 2D rankings on air for all 965's on hwbot. A few people have better scores on water cooling, however most everyone in front of me with the chip is using subzero cooling. A lot of the people behind me are on subzero too... I think its a pretty good chip I got here. Still however, the 975BE edged it out when putting the limit at 50C. Testing beyond that will take more work, however I have intentions to get LN2 on both of these chips, and then we'll have a better idea of where these chips find their upper limits.

For a chip like the 975 BE rated at 3.6Ghz, its hard to be disappointed about "only" being able to run at 4.5Ghz... But I managed. I really hoped it could get me to 4.6Ghz, but I could only boot into windows a couple times that high, and then it was really unstable. It needs more tender love and care, then maybe it can get there to run some benches... But I had the vcore all the way to 1.65V trying to push things higher and it just wouldn't play ball.

I had wanted to include some suicide runs towards the end, taking it as high as I could get it, but I couldn't find any way to get it 100mhz higher than the overclocked results you see in the benchmarks within the review. Both chips top out pretty close to eachother... Although I did get a 4.7Ghz CPU-z from the 965BE a few weeks back (not bad on air cooling). Maybe with more time the 975BE has it in it also, but I'm not certain.

Every chip varies of course, the luck of the draw is always a factor. Both contenders here can run solid benches at 4.5Ghz. The 975BE is a bit more comfortable there, which is good to see since after all it is a higher rated cpu.

As for temps, thats really hard for me to say which is why I didn't mention much about it in the review. If you put a gun to my head, I'd tell you the 975BE seems to run slightly cooler... Although thats hard to say because my monitoring equipment and temperature control leaves a lot to be desired. Temps stayed rather consistent in my testing... With the voltage I was running idle was usually around 26-27C, and full load topped out at 50C. It seemed like I could put a notch or two more voltage through the 975BE and still run the same temps the 965BE ran... But once again, I gotta cop out and tell you I don't have the temperature resolution or logging in place to be confident. Temps are close to the same... But I put a bit more voltage through the 975BE and it stayed under 50C consistently, while I couldn't give the 965BE that amount of voltage and keep it under 50C reliably.

BTW, the case it came in just had a piece of yellow paper scotched to the top, with 975 BE written by hand in red ink. These review chips come in interesting packages. I was surprised to see this after seeing the almost empty tray Hokie got in the mail.
 
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Very nice write up...

I do find something a bit odd though.

wPrime1024
975BE from your review: 4m 27s
555BE my best run: 11m 28s -> 3977MHz (4 cores) - ram @ 717MHz (9-9-9-24)

That's an improvement of ~61% and well expected from a much more powerful cpu.


wPrime32
975BE from your review: 8.643s
555BE my best run: 9.859s -> 3977MHz (4 cores) - ram @ 717MHz (9-9-9-24)

This is just a 12% improvement! :shock:

Does it really take that big of a jump in cpu/ram speed to gain that 1.3s?
 
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