System Setup

AMD Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition 125W
AMD Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition 140W
Gigabyte GA-MA790FXT-UD5P

4GB (2x2GB) Corsair CM3X2G1600C9DHX @ DDR3-1333 Speeds

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285
ForceWare 195.39

500GB Western Digital Caviar SE16

Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit

Benchmarks

Resident Evil 5
Crysis
Far Cry 2
3DMark Vantage
Cinebench 10
WinRAR 3.9
LAME MT
DivX 7
VirtualDub 1.9.6

Notes

Since we’ve already benchmarked the 965’s primary competitors extensively in previous articles, today we’re going to focus on how the original 140W CPU compares to its newer 125W cousin. If you need a quick refresher on how the Phenom II X4 965 compares to other CPUs in its price range, we suggest you flip back to our Lynnfield article from September, where we compare the 965’s performance against other Phenom II CPUs as well as Intel’s latest processors.