Review: AMD Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition: piling on the megahertz

Power-draw and overclocking

Idle and load power-draw is measured at the mains, via a watt-meter.

The idle figure represents the system simply running Windows Vista with no other load imposed, whereas load is defined as running the wPrime 1024m calculation which stresses all the cores.

The bump in clock speed has aided the Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition's outright performance, but at the expense of power consumption.

Readers should note that the Gigabyte motherboard used for the Core i7 benchmark has more bells and whistles than we'd care to list, helping to push up the idle power-draw figure.

There's no doubt about it, the Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition is a power hungry part. It eats up an additional 21W when compared to the marginally-slower 3.2GHz Phenom II alternative.

Intel's Core i7 is ringing alarm bells at the national grid, and the Core 2 Quads... well, they're practically green in comparison.

Overclocking

As with the Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition, we were able to push the quicker 965 - fitted with a Xigmatek Red Scorpion cooler - up to 3.8GHz with voltage at 1.55V. Herein lies the problem, as the Phenom II 955 Black Edition is some £45 cheaper and can be overclocked to roughly the same levels.