Thread: Amd phenom II X4 965

Ever since the launch of the Phenom II lineup, AMD is churning out new processors every few months. This time it's the new flagship model of the Phenom II X4 family, the X4 965 Black Edition. It's quite evident that AMD is riding on the benefits of a smaller manufacturing process. Techno¬logically it's similar to the former-most powerful X4 955 Black Edition. It features a native quad-core design and a massive 6 MB shared L3 cache. AMD has just bumped the multiplier from 16 to 17 to bring out this new model. So while the X4 955 ran at 3.2 GHz, the new X4 965 runs at 3.4 GHz, which is 200 MHz faster. Now the question is: would you buy a cheaper Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition and bump its multiplier to 17 or buy this CPU? It turns out to be the same either way, unless you don't mind shelling out a few thousand bucks to flaunt the fastest Phenom II CPU. We installed this processor on the Gigabyte MA790FXT-UD5P along with 4 GB DDR3-1333 memory and put it through a battery of tests to see how it compared to the X4 955. It took only 21 seconds to encode a 1 minute MPG video to x.264 format, which is 10 percent faster than the X4 955 and a mere 5 percent faster than the Intel Core 2 Quad Q9650.