AMD Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition Processor

Performance Summary: When we evaluated the Phenom II X4 920 and 940 processors upon their release back in January, we said this in our performance summary, "The new Phenom II X4 920 and 940 are easily the most powerful desktop processors released from AMD to date. They performed well throughout our entire battery of benchmark tests, besting AMD's previous flagship CPU...virtually across the board." Those words were true then, and with the release of the higher-clocked 3.2GHz Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition and 3.0GHz X4 945, they are true now. These two new processors are the most powerful desktop products to be released by AMD to date. Performance in every application was very good, as should be expected from a high-end quad-core processor, but as our tests have shown Intel still has a performance edge overall.

AMD has released some mighty interesting processors as of late. The inexpensive tri-core Phenom II X3 720 Black Edition generated quite a bit of buzz upon its release, due to its excellent value and overclockabilty. And it didn't hurt that a few weeks later news broke showing that some 720 BE processors could be modded into quad-cores with a simple BIOS tweak. The Phenom II 720 Black Edition was clearly a strong product in AMD's mainstream CPU line-up. The new Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition and X4 945, however, take things up a notch at the high-end of AMD's product stack, and like the Phenom II X3 720 Black Edition, they do so without breaking the bank.

The Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition and the X4 945 will be available immediately for $245 and $225, respectively (the 955 BE has already popped up on NewEgg). Pair one of these processors with an enthusiast-class 790FX or GX-based socket AM3 motherboard and 4GB of DDR3-1333 memory and you've got the makings of a powerful desktop platform for about $450. That's not exactly cheap, but considering the performance and overclockability of the platform, it certainly represents a good value. Yes, Intel's similarly clocked Core 2 Quads and Core i7 processors staill maintain a performance advantage, but there is no denying that AMD's Dragon platform is an attractive option that has only been enhanced by the introduction of these new CPUs.