AMD Phenom II X4 970 Black Edition

Phenom II X4 970 Black Edition
$185
AMD
www.amd.com

Just a small bump up from the one year-old AMD Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition in terms of specifications, the Phenom II X4 970 Black Edition is the new head honcho as far as quad-core AMD chips are concerned. The only big difference is a slightly different clock speed (3.4GHz vs. 3.5GHz).

Being a Black Edition CPU, the 970 is geared for overclocking, which it does quite well. By tweaking both the HT frequency and multiplier, we reached 4.05GHz and a score of P13299 in 3DMark Vantage with a stock CPU fan.

With the 970, AMD continues to play the game it has become adept at, which is to provide a satisfactory amount of bang for comparatively little buck. It might be tempting to forgo the 970 in favor of the slightly less expensive 965 because they�re so similarly specced, but the 970 seems to offer better overclocking headroom than the 965, which is well worth the difference in price.

Specs: Socket AM3; Clock speed: 3.5GHz; HyperTransport 3.0 link: 4GHz full duplex; 45nm process; Cache: 2MB L2, 6MB shared L3; 125W max TDP

Test system specs: Motherboard: MSI 890FXA-GD70; RAM: 2GB OCZ DDR3-1333; Graphics: ATI Radeon HD 5850; Hard Drive: 128GB Kingston SNVP 325 SSD

Phenom II X4 970 BE Benchmark Results
3DMark Vantage
Overall : P12779
GPU : 13064
GPU Test 1 : 39.82
GPU Test 2 : 36.66
CPU : 11994
CPU Test 1 : 1541.09
CPU Test 2 : 18.87

PCMark Vantage Pro
Overall : 11959
Memories : 7835
TV And Movies : 4646
Gaming : 12414
Music : 15103
Communications : 9183
Productivity : 16697
HDD : 19960

POV-Ray 3.7 : 3356.13pps*

Cinebench 11.5
CPU** : 4.13

World in Conflict
1,280 x 1,024 : 52

*pixels per second
**points


Source of Information : CPU Computer Power User November 2010