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

AMD Phenom II X4 970 Black Edition