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• AMD Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition Review

  There is nothing wrong with an incremental update—especially an update that adds performance without affecting pricing. Such is the case with AMD’s new Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition, which arrived at our performance lab running at 3.4 GHz—200 MHz faster than its predecessor, the Phenom II X4 955 BE. Everything else is exactly the same as the Phenom II X4 955, reviewed back in April 2009. So, if the latest Phenom II is predictably faster than AMD’s former flagship, why is today’s launch so significant? In short, it comes just a few weeks ahead of Intel’s upcoming LGA 1156-based P55 platform debut—an event that’ll almost certainly play a bigger role in the adoption of Nehalem-based machines than either the LGA 1366 Core i7 or Xeon 5500-series CPUs have thus far. After all, LGA 1156 is going to be the interface that purportedly makes Intel’s latest architecture accessible to the mainstream, supplanting the Core 2 family at a number of affordable price points. No doubt, those new Core i5/i7 CPUs will be faster than the Core 2 Quads they replace, and at competitive prices. Just when AMD looked like it had achieved performance parity with the top end of Intel’s Core micro-architecture, LGA 1156-based platforms seem almost certain to set the bar higher. Thus, today’s Phenom II X4 965 BE introduction is actually a fairly important one for AMD. On one hand, it could earn the company its mainstream performance crown—at least for a few weeks. On the other, it could be the last time Phenom II looks as competitive as it does now. Of course, that’s going to depend mightily on how the upcoming Intel chips perform. Up Against Core i5 Of course, we’re not able to publish performance numbers with the pre-production Core i5 processors currently running in the lab, so it’s hard to officially quantify how Phenom II will size up. But we can make best guesses using today’s Core i7s as rough test subjects. You’ll find all of our usual benchmarks on the pages that follow. First, however, we wanted to set up Phenom II X4 965 BE against a hypothetical Core i5-750—a processor expected to cost less than $200 when it launches. We simulated the 2.66 GHz offering with a Core i7-920, which runs at the same clock rate. Of course, we had to pull out a single channel of memory (yielding two channels of DDR3-1333) and disable Hyper-Threading, since Core i5 won’t have that feature. The one variable we couldn’t reproduce was Core i5’s enhanced Turbo Boost, which is expected to accelerate clocks to 3.2 GHz when a single core is active. Core i7-920 only benefits from a single bin of Turbo Boost, yielding 2.8 GHz instead. The only other platform capability setting LGA 1156 apart from LGA 1366 is the use of on-die PCI Express 2.0, which we’ve tested extensively and can say that, in single-card configurations, has almost zero impact on performance versus the X58’s chipset-based connectivity. See more products AMD Phenom II X4 955 Black... Directron $209.99 ElectronicsPLUS $233.19 CDW.com $319.99

• Before we dig into the complete Phenom II X4 965 BE review, let's look at our approximated Core i5 comparison: We’re used to seeing big bandwidth numbers from Core i7’s integrated memory controller and triple-channel DDR3 configurations. Pull one 64-bit channel out of contention and you’re still going to see significant throughput. In both test cases here, we’re looking at memory bandwidth using 4 GB (2 x 2 GB) DDR3-1333 at 7-7-7. This represents a worst-case scenario for Core i5, since iTunes is not threaded. Normally, the chip would surge to 3.2 GHz in a situation like this one, with a single core active. Instead, it earns its win at 2.8 GHz—the best our Core i7-920 could muster. Heavily optimized for threading, WinRAR is perhaps more demonstrative of how a Core i5 might perform in a situation with all four cores simultaneously taxed. The gain is, not surprisingly, more significant. In both DivX and Xvid encoding, performance between the Core i5-750 and Phenom II X4 965 is close. DivX is able to take advantage of multiple cores, so its result isn’t expected to change much when Core i5 actually starts shipping. Xvid only hits 25% utilization on a quad-core platform, though, so there’s a fair chance that extra Turbo-induced frequency will give Intel’s offering a larger lead. We only ran a handful of benchmarks here. These numbers are simulated, after all. Also, this is an AMD Phenom II review, and what matters most is how the Phenom II X4 965 fares against its competition today. Even still, we think it’s important to be cognizant of what’s coming, so if you want to draw your own comparisons between today’s AMD launch and Intel’s planned roadmap, bear in mind that Core i5 loses one memory channel and Hyper-Threading, but gains significant one- and two-core performance thanks to a beefed-up Turbo feature. Depending on the application, that should let you derive your own expectations of Core i7-920 and Core i5-750, both with 2.66 GHz stock clocks. See more products Intel Core i7 I7-920 Quad Core... Dell Home $349.99 EagleDirectUSA $305.22 Apogee Source $305.25 Compuvest $307.83 NextWarehouse $314.95

• The Phenom II easily bests Intel’s second-fastest Core 2 Quad (the fastest being the Q9650), but isn’t able to overtake the Core i7-920 running at its stock frequency. Losing one core and a ton of clock rate puts the fastest Phenom II X3 part way behind the rest of these quad-core contenders. The results here scale well according to clock rate and architecture, as iTunes really only utilizes a single thread. Both of Intel’s offerings score similarly, tying for first place in this one. TMPGEnc consists of DivX and Xvid-based transcoding workloads, the first of which is nicely optimized for threading, while the latter demonstrates consistent 25% utilization on today’s quad-core CPUs. Intel’s Core i7 dominates the DivX test, followed by AMD’s Phenom II X4 965. If the Core i5 launch wasn’t imminent, this would be a compelling value win for AMD, since its offering is quite a bit faster than the Core 2 Quad. However, if you flip back to our simulated Core i5 results, you’ll see that the planned sub-$200 i5-750 maneuvers past AMD’s flagship. In our Xvid test, the simulated Core i5 is even faster than the new Phenom II, though this chart shows AMD beating Intel’s Core 2 Quad fairly easily. The loss of a core doesn’t affect AMD’s Phenom II X3 as much, since Xvid doesn’t even fully utilize dual-core processors. Instead, dropping to 2.8 GHz is what causes the X3 to fall behind its higher-clocked family members. Another single-threaded test, Lame makes the clock speed scaling in AMD’s Deneb design quite clear. Both Intel processors duck in under the conversation times of AMD’s fastest CPU. And in the case of Intel’s Core 2 Quad Q9550, at a price point $25 cheaper, too.