AMD Opteron 3320 EE & 3350 HE with Gigabyte GA 970a UD3 (Socket AM3+)

amdIf you are looking for a fast, but energy efficient AMD CPU you´ll probably have heard about the Opteron 3300 series. The Opterons – formerly used only in server systems – are nowadays fully compatible desktop CPU´s using the common CPU socket AM3+. This socket is also used by AMD´s FX & A-Series CPU´s and a whole bunch of mainboards are available. The only problem is – most mainboard manufacturers only refer to the FX  & A-Series in their CPU compatibility lists and you´ll probably not find any information about the Opterons.

So I picked two 3300 series Opterons for a short test with the very popular Gigabyte GA 970a UD3 Rev. 1.0 mainboard.

The Opteron 3320 EE is the most energy efficient AMD quad core CPU currently on the market with a TDP of only 25W. The Opteron 3350 HE is the second most energy efficient AMD quad core CPU with a TDP of only 45W. While the 3320 operates at 1.9 GHZ, the 3350 operates at 2.8 GHZ.

Both CPU´s work fine with the Gigabyte GA 970a UD3 mainboard but only if you have the latest BIOS installed. In my case this was BIOS version F7 (2012.10.22). One important note: the BIOS can not be updated with the Opteron 3320 or 3350. You´ll need an older CPU that is already supported by your current BIOS version. I used an AMD Sempron 145 (Socket AM3) for updating.

Links:

Gigabyte GA 970a UD3 Overview: http://www.gigabyte.de/products/product-page.aspx?pid=3907#ov

Gigabyte GA 970a UD3 BIOS Download: http://www.gigabyte.de/products/product-page.aspx?pid=3907#bios

3 thoughts on “AMD Opteron 3320 EE & 3350 HE with Gigabyte GA 970a UD3 (Socket AM3+)”

  1. Thanks for the quick notes.

    I’ve found a few of the 3350’s on ebay and was thinking of playing around with them, but I have a 990FX (Asus M5A99X Pro 2.0) and an asrock 890FX Deluxe 4 board. According to ASROCK the board will “support” up to 95w tdp AM3+ cpus, but they won’t officially put it on the website.

    I could really use an “out of the box” low power cpu for light server duties if these actually work.

  2. Hey,

    it´s very hard to find boards that offically support the 3300 opteron series. But it should work fine if they support am3+ and the newest fx cpu´s, but you´ll probably need to update the bios to the most recent version. I can recommend you the 3320. I use it in a small storage server with Windows Server and 2x virtual windows 7 machines (via virtual box) and it runs fine. If you speak / understand german you should take a look at this (long) post http://www.hyperpac.de/?p=1655. It describes some issues with the 3350 cpu.

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