AMD Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition CPU Review

We ran a handful of processors and platforms, including the new Phenom II X4 955 BE and 945, through Futuremark’s latest system performance metric built especially for Windows Vista, PCMark Vantage. PCMark Vantage runs through a host of different usage scenarios to simulate different types of workloads including High Definition TV and movie playback and manipulation, gaming, image editing and manipulation, music compression, communications, and productivity.  Most of the tests are multi-threaded as well, so the tests can exploit the additional resources offered by a quad-core CPU.

In PCMark Vantage's Productivity, Communications, and Music tests, and in overall PCMarks, the Phenom II X4 965 BE performed very well, and was able to outpace the more expensive Core i7 920. In the remaining tests, however, the quad-core Intel processors we tested, with the exception of the Q9400, had the edge. And in the gaming test, the Core i7 was simply in a league of its own.