AMD's Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition

Fallout 3 Game Performance

Bethesda’s latest game uses an updated version of the Gamebryo engine (Oblivion). This benchmark takes place immediately outside Vault 101. The character walks away from the vault through the Springvale ruins. The benchmark is measured manually using FRAPS.

The gaming performance of the 965 BE is excellent, it actually managed to outperform even the i7 965 in our Fallout 3 test.

Left 4 Dead

In lightly threaded titles, clock speed and larger caches seem to be the biggest boons to performance. The 965BE is second only to the Core i7 965.

FarCry 2 Multithreaded Game Performance

FarCry 2 ships with the most impressive benchmark tool we’ve ever seen in a PC game. Part of this is due to the fact that Ubisoft actually tapped a number of hardware sites (AnandTech included) from around the world to aid in the planning for the benchmark.

For our purposes we ran the CPU benchmark included in the latest patch:

FarCry 2 is another example of a title well optimized for Intel's architectures and thus we see that the 965BE can't even win against its Q9550 competition. Thankfully for AMD, I do not believe FarCry 2 is representative of the majority of titles on the market.

Crysis Warhead

Crysis performance is virtually tied between the i7 920 and the 965BE.