<div id="intelliTxt"><span class="content"> <p><font size="2">The Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition impressed us when it launched earlier this week. Well, just about everything but the long-winded naming scheme and a slight concern about its power consumption under load conditions impressed us. Of course, the last minute change from a 125W TDP rating to a 140W TDP rating had us scratching our heads and those of the motherboard suppliers who will see a few less products certified for this processor. </font></p> <p><font size="2">That said, our first retail processor arrived in the labs yesterday. Of course, our first inclination was to test its overclocking capabilities and it reached the same 4.025GHz core speed the review sample managed on similar voltages. We did not expect any real miracles as the Phenom II tends to run out of steam around 4GHz when utilizing a 64-bit operating system. This particular chip did manage to hit 4.3GHz on 1.510V under Windows 7 x86, so it&rsquo;s a keeper. </font></p> <p><font size="2">Our initial curiosity of the way, we decided to take a quick look at whether undervolting this gem of a processor could reduce its carbon footprint. After all, a stock 1.40V core voltage setting is a bit high for our tastes although an idle rate of 1.00V with Cool-n-Quiet (CnQ) enabled produced excellent results in earlier testing.&nbsp; Of course, undervolting is not new and all current processors can handle a certain reduction in voltages.&nbsp; We wanted to see just how low our first retail 965 BE could go before becoming unstable.&nbsp; Our best 955 BE retail CPU hit 1.220V at a lower stock core speed of 3.2GHz and we thought this would be an attainable voltage target but at 3.4GHz considering the yield and process improvements made by AMD over the past few months.<br /> <br /> <a href="http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=3621">Read more...</a></font></p> </span></div>