AMD Phenom II 965BE Black Edition with a new stepping

Author: Jouni 'Jipa' Vasama Published: 25.11.2009 Manufacturer: AMD Product Group: Processors In English Suomeksi

Test setup

With the 965BE is downwards compatible with AM2(+) motherboards you can keep the overall platform cost very low by going with a cheaper chipset/motherboard. When choosing the board just keep in mind the still rather high TDP of 125 watts. We teamed the chip up with MSI's flagship model in their range of AMD motherboards - the 790FX-GD70.

The 790FX is AMD's highest premium chipset, so you also pay the premium for the 790FX-based boards, but the prices are generally still reasonable, especially compared to the X58-boards. The 790FX-GD70 features a great set of overclocking settings, on-board buttons and even an on-board OC-gear-knob that adjusts the HT-ref speed. These being the more fancy features, it also comes with the set of four x16 PCI-e slots, dual-Gbit-ethernet ports and more USB-connectors than you could possibly ask for.

Overclocking

Overclocking has generally been an area where the Phenoms haven't really shined. At stock speeds they have offered good value, but similarily priced Intel processors have been easy to overclock into speeds way beyond the Phenoms capabilities. Along with the Phenom 2 launch came better overclocking, and especially under LN2 and liquid helium cooling the new Phenoms have broken a number of world records. Anyway the day-to-day overclocking is what we're interested in, so lets see how the 965BE C3 does under normal air cooling.

Overclocking is one of the areas where the C3 is supposedly better than its predecessors. This being our first CPU-review in quite a while we didn't have an older Phenom processor to compare the newcomer to, but in our tests the clocking sure proved to be easy and rewarding. The Black Series CPUs all come with unlocked multiplier, which means that you can simply up the multiplied, never you mind those FSBs and how it might affect other parts.

The stock multiplier for the 965BE is 17, and in tests we found 20x200 (4 GHz) to be perfectly stable at voltages above 1,4 V. Sure there are differences from one chip to other, but seeing as we could push the chip to 4,2 GHz on air cooling, 4 GHz should be a baseline clock of some sort for all future owners of the C3.

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