AMD Phenom II X4 970 Review

Phenom X4 970 Black Edition Performance Analysis

As the X4 970 BE retails at £140 its going toe to toe with Intel's new i5-760 chip which is an update to the awesome i5-750. As a result we've been putting both chips through their paces in our super secret laboratory over the last few weeks to see how they compare. This, as some of you will have noticed, means the results for the i5-760 are included in the results graphs in this review. Check back tomorrow for the full review of the i5-760.

Our Socket AM3 test board, the excellent Asus Crosshair IV Formula, accepted the new chip without any problems, so we were quickly up and running with our testing. The X4 970 BE was quick out of the gates too, blasting through our Cinebench and WPrime tests as if they weren’t even there, and outpacing the comparably priced i5-760 CPU by 1-6 per cent. Things changed around dramatically when both chips were overclocked however with the X4 970 BE falling along way back behind the i5-760 when both CPUs were at 4.1GHz.


Things also went badly for the X4 970 BE in our Media Benchmark suite as at stock speed it fell behind the i5-760 in each test, managing an overall score of 1,339 compared to the 1,490 of the i5-760. At the risk of sounding like a broken record things went from bad to worse for the X4 970 BE at overclocked speeds. This shouldn't be a surprise though, this is pretty much the overriding pattern we've seen since Intel released its Core-i5 and Core-i7 processors. Still, the 30 per cent advantage that the i5-760 pulls out over the X4 970 BE in our Media Benchmarks when overclocked is nothing short of embarrassing for AMD, especially given that there is only £6 difference between the two chips.

We thought the X4 970 BE was in with a fair chance of saving some face in our games testing thanks to its high clock speed and in X3: Terran Conflict this seemed to be the case; both chips scoring an identical 41fps minimum and 86fps average. There was a fair gap between the two chips in Crysis, though, with the i5-760 eking out a healthy 4fps lead in this game. Clearly, the Cry Engine prefers the extra IPC (instructions per clock) that the Lynnfield architecture of the Intel chip is based on.

Our overclock boosted frame rates considerably for the X4 970 BE with the minimum recorded rate in X3: Terran Conflict rising from 41fps to 48fps and the same figure in Crysis being boosted from a laggy 23fps to a smooth, enjoyable 28fps. Unfortunately for AMD though the this wasn't enough to keep up with the i5-760 with even the budget Pentium G6950 moving ahead of the X4 970 in X3: Terran Conflict when overclocked.

Conclusion

Frankly anyone who knows what's what in the tech world knows the story with Intel and AMDs desktop CPUs at the moment. AMD's chips can generally compete at a given price point at stock speeds but fall way behind when any of the overclocking sauce is applied as Intels processors tend to have bags of performance in reserve. Unfortunately the story isn't any different here.

The fact that the X4 970 BE matched the equally priced i5-760 at stock speeds shows that AMD’s pricing is bang on for this chip. As usual though the new i5-760 (and the older i5-750 for that matter) is capable of much improved performance after just a few minutes tinkering in the BIOS, which makes the AMD chip look like poor value for anyone who is likely to indulge in some overclocking.

As such, if you've got £150 to spend on a new CPU, we cant recommend the X4 970 BE unless you already own a compatible motherboard and just want a simple upgrade. Instead our recommendation remains to be that you purchase a LGA1156 chip but you'll have to tune in tomorrow for our Core i5-760 review to see which one.

• Speed
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• -
• -
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• 7/10

• Features
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• x
• -
• 9/10

• Value
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• x
• x
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• x
• x
• -
• -
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• 7/10

• Overall
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• -
• -
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• 7/10

Score Guide