AMD Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition CPU Review

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.

HotHardware's Test Systems  Intel and AMD - Head To Head

Preliminary Testing with SiSoft SANDRA 2009  Synthetic Benchmarks

We began our testing with SiSoftware's SANDRA XII, the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. We ran four of the built-in subsystem tests that partially comprise the SANDRA 2009 suite with AMD's new Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition processor (CPU Arithmetic, CPU Multimedia, Memory Bandwidth, and Cache and Memory).  All of the scores reported below were taken with the processor running at its default clock speed of 3.2GHz, with 4GB of DDR3-1333 RAM running in unganged mode.

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.