Phenom II X3 720 Black Edition Tested
In the weeks to come, AMD will introduce its triple-core processors based on the 45 nm Heka core, starting off with the Phenom II X3 700 series. One of the first SKUs in the series would be the overclocker-friendly Phenom II X3 720 Black Edition. Based on the Heka core, it holds three x86 processing cores, 512 KB of L2 cache per core and a shared 6 MB L3 cache. The chip is specified to run at 2.80 GHz (200 MHz x 14.0), and features an unlocked bus frequency multiplier. It comes with a rated TDP of 95W. Turkish website Donanim Haber put an engineering sample carrying its specs to test on both DDR3 and DDR2 platforms based on Gigabyte's GA-MA790FXT-UD5 and MA790FX-DQ6, to find out its mettle.