TR Forums

Going from my Athlon II 250 to Phenom II 965 BE increased my Folding output substantially. Before it ran neck-and-neck vs my 45nm E6300 at around 1300-1500 ppd, now with the quad and the 400MHz boost that rig is now doing 2100-2300ppd. Too bad that GPU seems to cause some stability issues and after reboot I'll need to make sure the Folding VM is working again.

Yeah, the boost in folding output was a nice side bonus. But the main motivation for the upgrade was the boost in desktop performance. I was impressed enough when my work desktop got upgraded to a 945 (the original subject of this thread) that I've been wanting a Phenom II at home too!

I have to say I am very, very happy with my Phenom II 955 (purchased sept 09). It's in an AM2+ mobo with 6 gigs DDR2 800. It's just stinkin fast. I don't have any plans to move it to AM3, I'm going to just keeping it running on DDR2. My move to DDR3 will entail a new CPU and mobo. As well as things run on the 955, I don't anticipate needing to upgrade for a year or two - whenever the 955 starts bottlenecking games... and I haven't even overclocked it yet - but if Sandy ends up being something spectacular then...

flip-mode wrote:

My move to DDR3 will entail a new CPU and mobo.

...but that's the beauty of the Phenom II series (and pretty much the subject of this thread) -- you won't need a new CPU to move to DDR3 (unless you want to upgrade the CPU anyway). Just drop that 955 into an AM3 mobo and you should be good to go.

just brew it! wrote:

flip-mode wrote:

My move to DDR3 will entail a new CPU and mobo.

...but that's the beauty of the Phenom II series (and pretty much the subject of this thread) -- you won't need a new CPU to move to DDR3 (unless you want to upgrade the CPU anyway). Just drop that 955 into an AM3 mobo and you should be good to go.

If there was a compelling reason to make the move to DDR3 then I would. What's the performance benefit? I think it's next to nill. So if there's very little or no benefit to a RAM upgrade, it'll be a CPU upgrade that finally drives me to DDR3.

flip-mode wrote:

just brew it! wrote:

flip-mode wrote:

My move to DDR3 will entail a new CPU and mobo.

...but that's the beauty of the Phenom II series (and pretty much the subject of this thread) -- you won't need a new CPU to move to DDR3 (unless you want to upgrade the CPU anyway). Just drop that 955 into an AM3 mobo and you should be good to go.

If there was a compelling reason to make the move to DDR3 then I would. What's the performance benefit? I think it's next to nill. So if there's very little or no benefit to a RAM upgrade, it'll be a CPU upgrade that finally drives me to DDR3.

Same here. I am still running my 2x2GiB DDR2 with that Phenom II (before that the Athlon II). However, when the time comes that DDR2 costs a lot more than DDR3 and if there is a need for more RAM, then it may make sense then to buy DDR3 and a new board. The chance of that is quite low as by then I will probably just buy a new system altogether.

Yet another thing to consider is the max TDP that an AM2/AM2+ board will support. Many of the earlier boards, even with a BIOS update for PII support, only offer support up to a 95w TDP. Hell, Newegg was at one time selling an AM2+ board with a combo deal on a 125w TDP Phenom II X4 chip that would not work on the combo deal board !!


So check the specs before dropping the chip in. I was just gifted a Phenom II X4 965 from a friend who doesn't deal with AMD CPUs and I am trying to find a board in my collection to support it. Not looking good, as all I have is an eVGA 730A that WILL support the 125w TDP, but does NOT support virtualization and needs CnQ turned off to run 100% compatible.

Yeah, I actually started paying attention to the TDP numbers a couple of years back when I realized that there was a lot of variation from board to board. IIRC of the 4 AM2/2+ boards I own, all but one of them support 125W CPUs, and all support virtualization (and ECC RAM too, but most desktop users don't care about ECC).