AMD 3

EDITED

My 2nd 4770 got canceled as discontinued, and coincided with the wife's dell 8300 starting to fall over, so doing a wee build with parts left over and scavenged from the P5Q build
In the interests of cost, going AMD, and using Asus as its familiar to me, and DDR2 as I have 4GB spare from mine to use
these are UK costs, much more than US, but competitive for here right now

From CCLonline UK retailer

http://www.cclonline.com/product-inf...facturer_id=0#

AMD Phenom II X3 720 Black Edition Triple Core CPU
2.8GHz x3
512KB L2 Cache x3
6MB L3 Cache
Socket AM3 / 95W
Retail Boxed - Fan Included
Unlocked Multiplier For Easy Overclocking




http://products.amd.com/en-us/Deskto...False&f11=True




Asus M4A785D-M PRO AM3 Motherboard
AMD Socket AM3
AMD 785G + SB710 Chipsets
ATI Radeon HD Graphics, HDMI, DVI, VGA
Up To 16GB of 800/1066MHz DDR2 Memory
x1 PCI-e x16, x1 PCI-e x1, x2 PCI Slots
x6 USB 2.0 Ports, x5 SATA II Ports, RAID
7.1 Audio, 10/100/1000 Ethernet


http://www.cclonline.com/product-inf...35&tid=gsearch



motherboard http://www.techpowerup.com/index.php?101469

in a cheap but cheerful coolermaster elite 340

http://uk.coolermaster.com/products/...te=636&id=4195



Doing a Wall-E and recycling RAM, 750 silencer PSU and hard disks

Just going stock 'as its for the wife', future work would be custom cpu cooler, overclock and 4770 card

The old Dell 8300 has a (once upgraded) 7600GT AGP card, and an 3.4 P4 so it should be quite a boost.
Its been a reliable rig but can no longer work fast with photos. Its like treacle compared to my P5Q.

*maybe* this time there shall be no swear words nor bleeding knuckles, I live in hope

Its here, its together, just updating vista x64

First impressions great, very cool mATX motherboard, nice case, smaller than the old dell 8300

Bit of a squash getting Silencer Quad750 PSU in, wish it were modular as dont need a lot of cables. Put it in upside down and have cables stored above the DVD player

Just put one noctua external fan on the case.
The stock AMD cooler is quiet and the triple core runs very cool; hardware monitor showing ~28degC

Surprising even myself, everything worked right out of the box
The asus bios is very familiar but AMD CPU settings different so thats another day project

The heat sinks on dominator ram mean only can use top drive bay with old PTA IDE drive. Have jury rigged up another drive for file transfer.

System is running fast and so far so good. Pics tomorrow.

gets a 3.4 vista score with the integrated graphics, cpu 5.9, ram 5.9, hard disk 5.4

...and only one cut thumb lol

Good question Steve, it's relative price mainly:

Best bang for buck, doing an upgrade on Asus platform for least cost. Chose Asus for component familiarity, and compatibility. This model is also relatively new to market.

Quad AMD versus Quad Intel are so much cheaper

Triple AMD versus Quad, cheaper and (given what this PC will be used for) 3 cores is ample

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...-cpu,2280.html

The motherboard has integrated graphics ATI HD4200, which is also good enough 'now', but has a PCI express slot for the future.

EDITED

EDITED

http://benchmarkreviews.com/index.ph...&limitstart=11

I updated bios to 405, and just set the multiplier in bios to x20 for 3.2MHz and it went there fine, which is great

Reading up the black edition CPU can be pushed higher, just a stock cooler here though

nice, I'm also an AMD fan now, cheaper, fast, cool, competitive

the rig is fast as my quad in normal daily stuff.
Although its not yet prime stable, I did a quick test

Found AMD overdrive reference on

http://bjorn3d.com/read.php?cID=1656&pageID=7425

and giving that a whirl

http://game.amd.com/us-en/drivers_overdrive.aspx

thing is a decent cooler is ~ 1/3-1/2 the cost of the motherboard
but its fun software to play with

The wife is laughing that the monolith that is the P182 is being chased by the mATX box, this thing is tiny in comparison. She's well happy

I'll post some pics of the PC later today.
That AMD overdrive is excellent software. For anyone not used it before, you can still overclock directly in bios, but this allows you to overclock and do stability test in a windows enviroment.

For instance this is a black edition CPU so in bios, I've got the multipler set at x14 for standard 2.8MHz. Ive switched off cool and quiet for testing overclocking and also to see what the CPU temps are like for holding this for extended times, at 2.8
(cool and quiet reduces the clock and the voltage). Right now Im sitting at ¬36-38deg C

EDIT

Had some time today, used AMD overdrive to test 3.2MHz. Used x16 and 1.3625volts, ran fine for an hour, max temp 48deg C reported in Probe
Set same in bios for boot into 3.2MHz
I'll run the system like this for a while, seems fine.

Cheers!

was 3 now 4

Found this excellent thread and ended up unlocking the 4th core of the CPU in no time at all

http://www.overclock.net/amd-motherb...ers-unite.html

Its a stable Quad at stock speeds, testing 3.2 X4 today

Frigging thing is X4 2.8 stock against my Q9450 2.66 stock LOL

Awesome AMD

primed for about 4hrs at stock speeds rock stable, looks like I got a quad that was just routed to the triple bin
HeeHee, love free shit

I'll have a better cooler in here some point in the future, im doing some testing for better clocks but will probably either run stock or just a little higher until the cpu has better protection

Nice wee surprise though

some photos

Nothing too exciting

Rest in Peace, or at least in family spare parts, dell 8300 circa 2002


Big box PC but cost us over the years post warranty: new PSU, additional hard drive, different RAM, faster CPU, case fan, and AGP GPU. So whats the difference to self build?

Bit of a squash and a squeeze, mATX in coolermaster Elite 340



And the winner of 2009 cable routing prize is:



Note the temp hard drive rigup

Great wee very inexpensive case, and beside P182 for size comparison

Been running it now for a couple of weeks, and thought I'd do a quick update. The whole thread has been a bit chatty as it was written as it happened, rather than post build, but its funny as you can see how I just stumbled into the whole unlock the 4th core on a triple thing.

I can recommend this board as solid and reliable. In the AMD flavour here, its the same as intel variant, except you get to use cheaper processors.

I have my eye on a Noctua CPU cooler but its about $80equivalent so it will have to wait for another day. Until then we are just using the bios auto 10% overclock which bumps the speed up to 3.08GHz from 2.8GHz. Reading around it looks like the CPUs as triple overclock slightly faster than the cpus unlocked as quads. I'd guess and say 3.4GHz would be safe and reliable. Its an unnecessary expense for the aftermarket cooler right now, but the bios and CPUs make overclocking really easy - see the links on the bottom of the post.

Throw in an 4770 card (it has integrasted HD4200) and the system would be a great cheap gaming system - not too much different to my Q9450 (3.6GHz) with 4770.

Clock for clock i7 > Q9450 > AMD Phenom on the net benchmarks

When you unlock the triple you loose the core temperature readings, but you can still see the CPU temp in hardware monitor or in everest. In harwdware monitor its under temperatures, as TMPIN1

Here are some links for overclocking:

http://www.neoseeker.com/Articles/Ha...d_phenom_8750/

http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.aspx?i=3512&p=11

http://www.bjorn3d.com/read.php?cID=1489&pageID=6350

http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets...px?i=3492&p=11

Its been a fun build, and definately easier since the first one. The black edition unlocked CPUs save countless hours in surfing the net drawing on experts trials, trying to find the fiddly little bios settings to get a stable overclocked system.