AMD Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition CPU

AMD Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition CPU

Our Test Systems and SANDRA

How We Configured Our Test Systems: When configuring our test systems for this article, we first entered their respective system BIOSes and set each board to its "Optimized" or "High performance Defaults". We then saved the settings, re-entered the BIOS and set the memory timings for each platform manually. The hard drives were then formatted, and Windows Vista Ultimate SP1 was installed. When the Windows installation was complete, we fully updated the OS, and installed the of the drivers necessary for our components. Auto-Updating and Windows Defender were then disabled and we installed all of our benchmarking software, defragged the hard drives, and ran the tests.

The Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition performed very well in the sampling of synthetic SiSoft SANDRA tests that we ran. Due to its relatively high frequency, the 965 obviously outran every other AMD-built CPU by a fair margin and it hung in there with similarly clocked Penryn-based Core 2 processors, although Intel did have the edge overall. Core i7 processors held onto sizable leads in most tests, except for the integer portion of the Multimedia benchmark where AMD's new flagship was very strong.

..........................................................................................