Overclocking is always luck of the draw, but if you choose good PC hardware you won't be held back by a weak link in the chain. PCSTATS selected a Gigabyte GA-MA790FXT-UD5P motherboard, a 750W PC Power and Cooling power supply, and two sticks of the aforementioned Corsair memory. When it comes to overclocking, PCSTATS almost always relies on Corsair RAM - why settle for junk DIMMs?

Okay, let's getting down to business. AMD's Phenom II X4 965 BE (125W) CPU operates with a 17x multiplier by default, so the first step will be increasing this to 18x, 19x, then 19.5x and 20x. The multiplier was overclocked to 20.5x as well, but this caused the Phenom II X4 965 BE (125W) to BSOD while loading Windows Vsita. Still, as far as overclocks go 20.5x is pretty good - effectively 4.1GHz.

To recap, while the processor would POST at 20.5x, it wasn't stable so we were forced to settle on a maximum multiplier overclock of 20x, or 4.00 GHz for the Phenom II X4 965 BE (125W).

Overclocking the Motherboard Bus Speed

With the CPU multiplier back at 17x, PCSTATS set about overclocking the Phenom II X4 965 BE (125W) by bus speed alone. Starting from 200MHz, the Phenom II X4 965 BE was overclocked to 230MHz, 240MHz and 245MHz in quick succession before the Gigabyte GA-MA790FXT board balked out at 250MHz. After some trial and error, we eventually settled on a moderate overclock of 240Hz bus speed, or a processor speed of 4.08GHz!!

Bus + Multiplier Overclocking

For our final round of overclocking fun, the bus speed was reset to 200MHz and CPU multiplier to 17x, then we started increasing each setting towards its previous maximum. It didn't take very long before the Gigabyte GA-MA790FXT motherboard was running at 225MHz, and the multiplier at 18.5x - effectively 4.16GHz.

The system would POST but crash while loading Vista, so the bus had to be dropped down to 225MHz.

While your milage may vary, in the we settled on a 18x multiplier and 225MHz bus speed which left us with a CPU overclock of 4.05GHz. That's a pretty decent overclock of 650MHz above the stock speed of the AMD Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition (125W) processor! Next up, PCSTATS has several round of benchmarks to test the Phenom II X4's multi-threading capabilities and how it stacks up against CPUs like the Core i5 750!

Prelude to Benchmarks

For this review PCSTATS is running the benchmark suite in both Microsoft Windows Vista and Microsoft Windows 7 operating systems. Hopefully this will help you make an informed decision in the coming months as Windows 7 adoption firms up. For the most part, benchmark results are not significantly different between the two operating systems, although certain tests do see advantages under Win 7.

Over the following page we'll be running AMD's 3.4GHz quad-core Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition (125W revision) processor though PCSTATS standard set of gaming, productivity, and multi-threaded processor benchmarks. There are a wide variety of gaming and synthetic benchmarks here to illustrate what kind of performance boost users can expect from the latest quad-core socket AM3 AMD processor. Please take a moment to look over PCSTATS test system configurations before moving on to the individual benchmark results on the next several pages.

PCSTATS Test System Configurations

test system reference system #1 reference system #2 reference system #3 processor: amd Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition (140W) AMD Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition (125W) AMD Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition AMD Phenom II X3 720 Black Edition AMD Phenom II X2 550 Black Edition AMD Athlon II X4 620 AMD Athlon II X3 435 AMD Athlon II X2 250 AMD Athlon II X2 240e Intel Core i5 750 Intel Core i7 920 Intel Core 2 Duo E8500 Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 CPU Process Technology: 45nm 45nm 45nm 45nm Socket: Socket AM3 Socket LGA1156 Socket LGA1366 Socket LGA775 Clock Speed: 17x 200MHz = 3.4 GHz (965 BE) 16x 200MHz = 3.2 GHz(955 BE) 14 x 200 MHz = 2.8 GHz (720 BE) 15.5x 200MHz = 3.1 GHz (550BE) 13x 200MHz = 2.6 GHz (AIIX4 620) 14.5x 200MHz = 2.9 GHz (AIIX3 435) 15x 200MHz = 3.0 GHz (AIIX2 250) 14x 200 MHz = 2.8 GHz (AIIX2 240e) 20x 133MHz = 2.66 GHz 20 x 133 MHz = 2.67 GHz 9.5 x 333 MHz = 3.16GHz (E8500) 9 x 333 MHz = 3.0 GHz (E8500) Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-MA790FXT-UD5P (AMD 790FX) Gigabyte GA-P55-UD6 (Intel P55) MSI X58 Platinum (X58 Express) MSI X48 Platinum (X48 Express) Videocard: ASUS ENGTS250 DK (Geforce GTS250) ASUS ENGTS250 DK (Geforce GTS250) ASUS ENGTS250 DK (Geforce GTS 250) MSI NX8800GTS-T2D320E (Geforce 8800GTS) Memory: 2x2GB Corsair XMS3-1600C9 DDR3 2x1GB Patriot PDC32G1600LLK DDR3 2x2GB Corsair XMS3-1600C8 DDR3 3x2GB Corsair TR3X6G1600C8D DDR3 2x1GB Patriot PDC32G1600LLK DDR3 Hard Drive: 74GB Western Digital Raptor WD740 Optical Drive: ASUS BC-1205PT-BD Power Supply: PC Power & Cooling TurboCool 750W Heatsink: Athlon64 K8 Reference Heatsink Intel Reference 1156 Heatsink Intel Reference 1366 Heatsink Intel Reference 775 Heatsink Software Setup: Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate AMD Catalyst 9.8 nVIDIA Forceware 190.62 Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate Intel 9.1.1.1019 nVIDIA Forceware 190.62 Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate Intel INF 9.1.0.1012 nVIDIA Forceware 182.08 Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate Intel INF 9.0.0.1008 nVIDIA Forceware 169.25 Benchmarks: System Benchmarks: SYSmark 2007 PCMark Vantage SiSoft Sandra 2009 Calculation B/M: Super Pi 1.5 wPrime 2.0 ScienceMark 2.3 WinRAR 3.8 Bibble 5 Rendering B/M: Cinebench R10 POV-Ray 3.7 SPECviewPerf 10 Gaming B/M: 3DMark06 3DMark Vantage Cyrsis FEAR