Phenom II X4 965 - How does it hold up with modern games?
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 11 ก.ย. 2024
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"Ooo, time for another 'retro' setup review/video!"
**subject is my current main computer**
":/"
JLsoft same
Mine to, why the sad face?
They did it after 10 years, some stuff get useless after 4, this CPU may be one of the most successful in time, but we all know it's not up to today standards
Mine too. It's still serving me good after 8+ years...
I *just* upgraded to a Ryzen 5 2600 from a 955. It hasn't been long enough for me to feel nostalgic yet. 😆
Haha basically! I used to run an X4 965BE, but I upgraded to an X6 1100T which I still run to this day as my main machine
I built two systems ten years ago: one asus X58 P6T with a I7 920 and one 790XT-UD4P with a Phenom II 955. Both systems have been rock solid and are still being used with some upgrades (HD to SSD and GPU's). I upgraded the I7 920 four years ago to a xeon x5670 and I recently purchased a phenom X6 1100T to stretch the life of the AMD system further. Both systems started orignally with Vista and have had four OS upgrades since. 2008/9 was really a great period for building a PC.
I'm the exact same situation. I built a Xeon 3520 (basically a 920) machine 9 years ago, and I've recently replaced the CPU with a 6-cores Xeon X5650 @4.0GHz. Pretty good lilttle upgrade, on the cheap.
I went with great components back in the days and I'm still surprised to this day how great that computer has been and still is despite its age. Everything's still original except for the CPU and some new 3TB HDDs:
-eVGA X58 Classified motherboard
-12GB G.Still Trident RAM @1000MHz
-2 x Intel X25M 80GB SSDs in RAID-0 (they still work perfectly! That shows how resilient SSDs are, even the first ones on the market)
-Radeon HD 5970 (that thing was crazyness back in the days!)
-Xonar Essence STX sound card (used to use that computer as my DAC, for my tube amp)
etc.
You're right, 2008-2009 was an awesome time to build a PC ;)
2500k replaced with a 3770. Best bang for buck cpu upgrade ever and still fights alongside other platforms as long as i accept the fact 144hz is possible but not worth the investment to do that on 1155 (just go new at that point if you want 144hz or 4k your spending money to buy new anyways
I had an i7 920 on a p6t last summer! Rock solid system! I was gonna put an x5650 in it and do a 4ghz oc but ended up selling it
Currently on a i7-2760qm laptop. SSD & HDD in DVD bay. Still holds up as a daily beater. 3770 & 4790 Desktops. No rush on any of it.
@@czos9239 I had the 3770 about 3 months ago and built a new ryzen 3 1200 system. Literally no difference lol
pretty crazy how a decade old CPU is still able to run latest AAA games
Answer: Jaguar Cores in the consoles. Half the clock speed (depending on console) + ~80% the IPC of Deneb. And the consoles are reserving one or two of the cores for background crap.
my "duck" 3 decade old and still a beast... ;)
@XmodsTheSpot DDR2 400 MHz? Or does it show 800MHz in CPU-Z? Also it's sooo important to overclock the CPU-NB (memory contorller and L3 cache speed), especially important with slow RAM. Just don't ever go over 1.35V CPU-NB, give it some margin. Should go from 2000 MHz to 2800 MHz easy. Massive boost.
yea.. not much progress lately. during year 2000 10yo cpu was like not just obsolete but rather totally ancient.. now 10yo cpu is like.. smth similar like brand new low-end :D
Basically once quad cores came out it wasn't as much of an issue.
That being said the first gen Phenom don't hold up as well as the second, but that seems to be a general theme with AMD. First gen is good, second gen is great.
I am using it right now and I have been using it for the last 10 years and it still running like brand new. Phenom X4 965 is a legend.
I have a x2 550 Black Edition unlocked to a 4 core (955) on a Asrock N68-S3. It was a cheap build, it is still working great.
I now use it as a test system.
this was my first proper CPU, I had the Black Edition managed to get a 4.0ghz OC out of it. I still have it
I got a 970 @4.2 stable....it runs warm but stable
I have my 955 up over 4.0 as well and use it regularly too, great chip.
@@chrisbutterfield7572 AMD chips OCed so well. I could sometimes get 4.1 but wouldn't always be stable.
What do you mean proper? A cpu is a cpu. Anyway, my first cpu was a Pentium 133.
@@jbgreen27 you took my british-ism as literal, by proper I mean first bought CPU, something I actually bought for a system
not a pre built system etc.
like when you say, its literally boiling outside. it isn't *LITERALLY* boiling outside. its to emphasise language
Great video! Love my AMD Phenom 965!!! Thanks for the review!
It's nice to know there is a community out there that appreciates older hardware. I sincerely miss my i5-3570k
loved my 3570k
Getting one of these bad boys for my retro rig. It's looks like I won't be disappointed.
Just Rebuilt a Phenom X6 with 8 gigs ram added a 57 dollar RX-460 from E-Bay. It was my old HTPC/Photo editing rig. Now have 6 years recorded TV to watch.
Nice video of what is probably my favorite cpu line of all time.
I got a 945 (3.0 ghz 95w) and gigabyte board in 2009. Overclocked to 4.0ghz. Nearly ten years later and it’s still going strong. Definitely long-ish in the tooth especially since it’s a ddr2 setup. But still great for most tasks. Most stable/solid/problem-free build I’ve had in 25 years.
Exactly "Most stable/solid/problem-free" build I've had in 27 years! My CPU is the 955 oc to 3,8 GHz.
Imagine trying to run games from 2009 on a 1999 processor.
Well... That is not possible... A Pentium III barely can run the newest OS's... Only Windows 7 is possible for this CPU and games of 2003/2005 are possible to run in this CPU satisfactorily
In 2009 to 2012 AMD have been passed bad times, they struggle to even match their competitor (Intel) and with the fiasco of the FX's series, the CPU passed 5 years of stagnation... Maybe 9 to 10 years of stagnation, because even with the Phenom's AMD haven't surpassed the "Core I" Series (AKA Nehalem/Lynfield)...
It’s a 2008 cpu...
The lack of SSE4.1 in these CPUs made me ditch my Phenom II x6 for modern games. Now, SSE4.2 is starting to creep into games for DRM reasons, I guess.
Good video Phil!
Michael Zander
Haha im still running on my 1055T.
@@laharl2k It actually does really well on games that can run on all 6 cores.
Oh how does that DRM work?
@@pleasedontwatchthese9593 Denuvo needs SSE 4.1 and now needs 4.2 too
Yep, Nehalem/Lynfiled was the great buy back then, not Phenom. Phenom only for budget builds and it really did not hold up performance and compatibility wise compared to Nahlem. It was good competition for Core2 quad, but unfortunately for most of its lifetime it had to fight much better and more advanced competition.
Ah, the good old 965, it served for many hours as game muncher and room heater in my old PC. :D
This was my first desktop processor. Got me through my first couple of years gaming on PC.
@Marcos F for you my guy
Marcos hows the perfomance? And what is your gpu with phenom x4 965. How many fps you get?
Ha, my CPU right there, I'll tell you here, in 2019, is the first time I feel it can't take it anymore, I mean, gaming at high quality, up to 2016 I could game at max everything, after that, high or medium, depending on the game, Insurgency Sandstorm was the first game I had to change some things to low so I could get a decent 30 fps, this CPU impressed me a lot, if it could take more I'd keep it, but it has done everything it could for me, and I couldn't be happier with it...
PS: I've never once OCed it, still stock to this day
BTW, my MOBO is a Asus M4A78T-E, and the voltage caps at 1,375 at full load, it was always capped at that, I never touched it, as everyone I talked about said it was a very good energy use, but also at Auto voltage in Bios, thoughts?
@@MihzvolWuriar What gpuare you using in it?
@@nathanhamman418 right now, a RX560, but I bought it last October, until then, it was a R9 280x
@@MihzvolWuriar if u have a friendly BIOS tweak that bastard. Also if you havent sold Ur previous 280x put it back. In any case tweak memory straps
The 280x cooler is broken, I'm having a hard time finding one here in Brazil, and since I paid around 100 US$ for this new RX560 with 4gb back in october, the deal was sweet enough for me, and sincerely, I didn't notice any performance loss...
But btw, I'm already planing on getting a new cooler for the 280x next month, to see if I can get it to work again
They're essentially coming to the end of their usefulness. Games can now require instruction sets it doesn't support, and the CPU is just a bit too limited, even with a powerful GPU.
On a side note, I can undervolt my 125W 955 from 1.4v to to 1.185v. Heat drops by over 5C!
I still remember my first gaming rig featuring the 960T chip variant. The best part was being able to run it unlocked as an X6 1605T @ 4GHz (basically a 1075T) it was a crazy good CPU until I had to switch to Sandy Bridge just to get single and dual threaded games to go smoothly. But, Ryzen 1 and 2 meant I had to go back because extra threads were finally starting to make more sense for gaming.
I actually had a 1060T back in the day and that 6 core monster was great for video editing along with SLI GTX460 cards. I still have the machine I replaced it with, I jumped AMD ship to Intel for a 3770K that I undervolted and overclocked to 4.1Ghz with a GTX 780ti, thing is still rock solid and more performance than I have use for.
Phenom ii 965 x4 cannot be unlocked to 6 cores its strictly 4 core... it's a deneb chip. u must be thinking of 960t x4 it unlocks to 6 it's a thuban chip hence the T....
I had a PC with a Phenom II X4 B95 and a GTX 1650. It held up pretty nicely in most modern titles at 1080 high settings. Even Shadow of the Tomb Raider ran nicely as medium high settings in 1440p, but 4k was a little too much of an ask.
I built my first gaming PC with a Phenom X4 955. That thing was amazing at the time and it made me fall in love with PC building/gaming. Went to Intel after 2013 because of the single thread performance but this year I'm back with AMD Ryzen! Long live the PC!
Still on a Phenom II X4 820 ;)
I used this configuration up to a couple of years ago, I still have the hardware and my son uses it now. It was always a good setup, and with an inexpensive GPU (a 550ti) it was able to run a surprising number of modern games. The only things it struggled with were CPU limited games like ArmA2/DayZ, where the I7 was king.
Ha! I have this exact Motherboard and I was looking to buy this CPU for a cheap old PC gaming setup! PERFECT!
I tried my old Phenom II X4 955 BE @ 3.8GHz (NB @ 2.4GHz) with GTX 980 @ 1500/1950, the CPU did surprisingly well. My worst bottleneck was 4GB DDR2-800, since I had only an AM2+ motherboard with 2x DIMM slots.
I loved my 965 when it was in my main system. When my first X99 board needed RMA'd, I had to go back to it for a few weeks and for most tasks it still performed admirably, though I noticed a bottleneck with my R9 390 and in some more intensive workloads like large audio projects, the chip just couldn't keep up. I had mine overclocked to 3.8GHz @ 1.48V, and no matter how hard I tried it would not go any higher. I had the CPU-NB overclocked too (as is the norm with the Phenoms with their onboard IMC) to 2600MHz @ 1.25V and that had a MASSIVE effect on performance.
It's good CPU, I like the old Phenoms :) I have Phenom II X4 960T and 955. Unfortunately all Phenoms don't support SSE4.1 which means that most of the new games can't run. But for online game like Fortnite and other there are no problems. The problems is that even after 10 years they are too expensive compared to old Intel's CPU (socket 1156 and some 1155).
You OCed wrong! Those phenoms II were very memory bottle necked. You have to overclock the northbridge if you want the faster memory to have any effect.
You can also do the HT bus but that doesnt do much.
Try to get the northbridge to 2500MHz. My 1055T is at 2500Mhz but i heard the older ones didnt like overclocking the northbridge a lot, though maybe 2500mhz isnt "a lot" so give it a try! It should give you a couple more fps.
2,5ghz overclock for the northbridge is normal. 2,8-3,0 ghz is also achievable.
I overclocked my northbrdige to 2,6 ghz at that time. 1055t@3,5ghz
Would have enjoyed seeing the same thing. Also kind of curious how his overclocked 965 didn't outrun the stock clock /9650/ even though they were pretty equal then the CPUs came out without the overclock.
Also, about idle voltages, you can use PhenomTweaker software.
We had to OC via northbridge because we were to cheap to buy a black edition lol I had the 1055t to but couldn't get it stable past 3.6ghz :'(
Poor peasants trying everything to squeeze every last drop of mediocre performance
k10stat or phenomsrtweaker lets you go even lower (or higher / set custom voltage / frequency for every p-state) :)
The true lowest default state is 800 Mhz but it's only reachable when Cool n Quiet is enabled and the host OS is set to power save or dynamic mode. These processors are kinda weird with both multipliers AND dividers for the core clock so you can go quite crazy if you want
I'm building a Phenom II X4 955 with a Gtx 950 and this goes in my recommendations. Thanks TH-cam, very cool.
Great video. Undervolting makes quite the difference in power consumption. More than I thought it would.
I blasted my Phenom II X4 945 to 4 GHz. Living live on the edge.
You are right F2F Tech.. undervolting can make a big difference.
My Socket 939 Athlon 64 x2 runs at 2.2 GHz and officially needs 1.35v vCore. Unofficially I was able to hit 2.7 GHz, on a stock cooler - at just 1.20v. I could have gone even higher with a better cooler and possibly a better a board as it was cheap and I didn't want to risk over-loading the VRM. But man..all this from a 90 nm CPU. I was really happy with the performance.
From what I have read, the reason it clocked so well was down to cache, or rather defective cache. There was originally 1MB L2 cache per core, some of which was defective, so AMD simply disabled the defective part leaving 512k kb per core. However the increase surface area acts like a heat-sink, thus allowing better heat dissipation.
Whatever the case, I have kept this CPU and got me a nice board off the auction site (ASUS A8N32-SLI Deluxe) which has an 8-phase VRM for greater stability. More of a side-project, I just want to see just how high this little belter will go.
I also did some under-volting on someone's Phenom II 1055T. Got it down from 1.35 to 1.20 and it's as stable as a rock, plus the cooler is so much quiter as naturally it doesn't have to shift so much heat. If it were my CPU I'd clock the bugger as high as it would go :)
I've got as my secondary budget pc the 965 x4 black edition overclocked from 3,4 to 4,0 (Artic Freezer 13 cooler) using a nvidia GT1030 graphic,12gb HyperX of ram and a SDD 250gb hdd as the main drive in Windows 7, and I can tell you it runs quite nicely on most games and overall usage. On my third pc I got the 980 x4 black edition overclocked from 3,7 to 4,3 with the same components as the other one. So far its been four years running both pc's in this setup without any issues. Just do a pc maintenance often keeping it clean and dustfree.
I have one of these laying around, as I recall it's clocked at a little over 3.6, I gave away a Phenom II 955 which is the same processor just duel core instead of quad. I also currently have in service as a file server an 1100T 6 core also clocked a little over 3.6...I just bought a 9900k (first personal build in 10 years) and have retired my 965EX ($1000 chip at the time) and will probably re-purpose that as the file server. Unless someone in my family needs a gaming computer, just drop a 1060 back into it and it will play anything great. I have it comfort clocked at 3.9
I just got a Phenom II gaming rig from back in the day for free. Unlocked the other two cores and have it running at 3.8 GHz. Very fun to tweak these old systems and see what performance you can get out of then :P
My oldest build is a Phenom II X4 965 I upgraded to a ssd for the C drive and I have a 960 video card in it. It's what I used to watch this video and write this comment. I still use this for video editing and conversion. My new build is a Ryzen 7 1700 Asrock Taichi WD PCI M.2
I've been running a Phenom 965 for about ten years and it's served me very well indeed. It plays most of my games, but not those that require SSE4 and video rendering could be improved.
I've decided to sell it and go for an FX8350, because I need more oomph!
Great CPU though, it never let me down and stays pretty cool , especially when water cooled.
If the FX 8350 fits your board, you will love it. I had one for like 6 month and the MB blew up. MicroCenter gave me a nice refund & I got a Ryzen 1600x. The only reason I got one was the MB bit the dust. For games, MS office like stuff and the Internet the FX-8300 series CPU is pretty nice. FOr the 3 aforementioned tasks it is hard to tell the difference between the FX & the Ryzen. For Rendering & CAD & if you are doing Paid Work the the Ryzen makes real sense.
Get the biggest SSD you can afford for the boot disk and 3tb for games & you are good for a few more years.
Anyone with a FX or Phenom check out "Process Lasso Pro" you can do everything task manager can't like assign different cores to different jobs. Like all 2 core games get the fastest 2 core etc..... it made a huge difference on my FX_8350. It made such a large difference I bought a lifetime/multi machine licence.
ANyway have fun & good luck!
I have a phenom II x4 955 BE that I bought new in 2009 for my main machine back then. It has been overclocked beyond 4ghz for most of its life and I still use it weekly. Such a great little chip.
I didn't realize how nice this processor was!
I was recently given one of these and a BIOSTAR AM3 motherboard. So naturally I built a PC. The main thing that excited me was it having a floppy drive controller and I managed to get my hands on a functional floppy drive and cable. It is a bit of a gimmick for me but there are apparently people who still use floppy diskettes for their work. I was thinking that maybe I could sell the computer to one of those folks. Given that the board supported DDR3 memory, I figured it was decent enough to be a work computer. Then I came across this video!
Nice video - good build. My pc in it's last configuration was an AM3+ Gigabyte 990FX-GamIng MB - AND FX-9590 cpu - MSI Radeon RX-580 Gaming X 8gb - 32 gb of ddr3 @ 1866 , storage was a 1tb samsung 970 evo nvme m.2 - it could just about run any thing i wanted too. I would of been still using that setup but the mb got ruined due to a random set of power spikes that we had really close together. My system now has the following - AM4 Asus ROG STRIX X470F-Gaming mb -AMD R7 2700X cpu - Gigabyte RX Vega 64 OC , 32 gb od ddr4 @ 3000 mhz - the same 970 evo - the current set-up works very well for what i need to do.
this cpu was in first gaming pc i built myself on 2012 firstly with Readon HD7770 1ghz edition, later with R9 270 and same pc is still running doing its job serving as home media pc/ guests pc :)
My stepdad still uses my old 940 system. Was a great CPU and still is.
I run a 940 BE (slightly overclocked) with my Radeon 560 and it's quite adequate for games at decent settings, 1080p. I've had plenty of fun playing through semi-recent games such as Doom, the recent Wolfenstein installments, the two Metro Redux games, etc. I'll be upgrading this year hopefully but I've gotten so much mileage out of this 940 - quite impressed I'm still able to keep running it in 2019.
Oh the Phenom II X4 what a classic CPU. There is one Phenom II X4 that can be turned into an x6 which is a 960T. My one friend is rocking a 1060T X6 and it still handles some modern games ok but he needs a new PC badly.
Yea I tried to get hold of a X6, but they are quite expensive...
Running a X4 965 on a GA-MA785GM mobo w/16gb ddr2, ssd and a GTX660 topped with a 1000w ps , this system has no difficulty with most games, EOS...FortNite....etc. Granted its about 10yrs out of date, but aside from making a dent in my utility bill, I got no plans to sunset it. Works great.
Also my cpu averages about 35c idle and 50-55c when in game play.
Warning for people who are looking to buy Phenoms in 2019/2020:
These chips don't have SSE 4.1 & 4.2 instruction sets, which are used by many modern triple AAA titles these days.
So, if it's going to be a single player game, or a paid multiplayer game, most, if not all, publishers will patch it out within a week or two, tops. Case in point - RE7.
This is because, the publisher sees you as a potential customer as their product is a buy-only business model, no matter what's under your rig.
But, when it comes to F2P MP games, the support is declining year over year.
For example Titanfall 2, a game that runs on the source 2 engine, came out without support for Phenoms, and within a week, Respawn/EA let a patch out removing the SSE4.2 requirement, because IT IS A FULLY PRICED GAME.
But switch to Apex Legends now, which is developed by the SAME DEVELOPER, SAME PUBLISHER and runs on the SAME engine, will boot up the game, can even play training grounds, but will crash to desktop when you connect to an online match, because their anti-cheat measure requires SSE.4.2 and since it's an F2P game and it's microtransaction engaging population is extremely low, even lower for users with Phenoms.
Respawn straight up said that they won't support this CPU line, without giving away the reason which is obvious, their laziness.
So, beware of that before you make a purchase.
Apart from that, it's a bloody good CPU line that punches above it's weight in ALL modern day titles at 1080p.
I would even say that it will play CBP2077 at ultra 1080p over 60 FPS with a RX580, maybe drop a setting or two in post process / alpha effects, to maintain 60.
Just slap on a cheap cooler like the Cooler Master Hyper 212 Evo, and OC this past 4Ghz to reach it's maximum potential. It's incredibly easy and you can find tips with simple googling and even here on TH-cam.
Remember that a 6-core Phenom's safe average OC limit is around 4-4.2 GHz and a 4-core Phenom's safe average OC limit is around 4.5Ghz, this doesn't include silicon lottery.
One last thing: Don't put in anything above an RX 580 or the RX 590 (or it's Nvidia equivalent), as that's your bottlenecking cutoff point. Anything above that is wasted.
Happy gaming, my Phenom fam!
I've got a Phenom II x4 955 BE running in my system and it is able to run many games nowadays, more or less. Optimized games like Warframe or even DOOM 2016 are fine, but StarCraft 2 for instance starts massively lagging when playing custom maps due to the old Dual-Core engine.
My motherboard also set the default voltage to 1.4 and at full-on it raises the voltage to 1.472 aswell. My CPU is able to run stable at 4.000 MHz at 1.4V. Undervolting with 4 cores works just fine with 0.9625V @ 4x 800 MHz.
What I've noticed about my MB is that the NB is fairly holding back the CPU. I've got an AsRock 870 Extreme3. My NBs' default speed is 2000 MHz. I managed to up it to 2400 MHz and the impact is amazing - roughly 30% effective overall performance boost!
However, whenever I try to change the NB voltage in the BIOS, my PC won't boot! >:-(
I'm pretty sure that this CPU series is capable of a lot more, if there are no other bottlenecks!
A really big downside on this CPU is Video editing! Even if you just convert an .avi file to .mp4 it takes roughly 3-5x of the clip duration, even with GPU encoding enabled!
Thank you for this video! ♥ You literally just saved my day! :)
Integrated ATI Radeon HD 4250 graphics on the motherboard, says Gigabyte's website. Keeping it in the family, unlike the two AM2+ and one AM3 boards I have that sport nForce chipsets with Geforce onboard graphics. Red and green in perfect harmony.
I instantly recognized your avatar. If only Commodore had made a better go of that amazing hardware. I also had an A2000 in mint condition, which I sold because I desperately needed the money. I really regret selling it. I often wonder what a present-day Amiga would be like.
@@QuadTubeChannel Did you run 'productivity' software on your A2000? Graphics/video/office?
I built a Phenom II 965 Black rig back in 2010.
I ran that rig using an MSI AM3+ 870 mb at 3.988ghz on air with a Hyper 212 Evo for over 6 years until the MSI boards VRM gave up the ghost. I used a 4x4 Kit of Patriot Viper 1600mgz 9-9-9-9-24-1T for memory and I had it paired originally with the Sapphire Toxic HD6950 Dual Bios GPU that shipped with the HD6970 Bios on the switch. That GPU had a very high probability of running the 6970 bios and mine did. That system could still play pretty much any game I threw at it with medium to high settings. The rig was mainly built for WOW and SWToR and I was never disappointed. Before it died in 2016 I threw in a 4gig RX480 and played pretty much any title I wanted to. Fun to watch a blast from my past being brought to life again. I still have both the 965 and my HD6970 my issues been finding a good deal on an AM3+ motherboard to throw them into that doesn't cost as much as current new tech...
You forgot to overclock the CPU-NB! I am amazed at how often this is overlooked. Go into your BIOS and find PSTATES choose custom and then you should see an option to modify your CPU-NB speed. With a 965BE you should be able to hit 2.8-3.0Ghz at a voltage of 1.20-1.25 volts. You will be amazed at the performance increase once you make this one simple change. Please do another video on this! We would love to see you buy an AMD 960T and unlock it to a Thuban Hexacore. I recommend doing that, it's a lot of fun! Thanks for the great content.
I used to have this CPU on an Asus mobo cannot recall which one with a Radeon 5850. It was good at the time and remembered running Crysis on it! I had a case that had it all but eventually became electrically faulty. Unbeknown to me I thought it was the motherboard - proved it was the case since an binned it gutting! Of course my Ryzen CPUs are faster nd more efficient now but that was my start on the road to prime time!
thats awesome I rock that same motherboard rev 1.0 with an Athlon II x4 630, 8gb of ram, and a RX580. still decent
I salvaged this cpu and with exactly same mobo, with 2x 4gb rams from 2nd hand market for very cheap and hooked up with my rx 570. Occasional fps drops were happening during games, I guess it is due to my low memory (ram).
Great video man!
Almost a decade ago, I had the 960 black. it still resides in my mom's pc now :D
I had a Phenom II X4 945 - 3.0GHz ---- 2009. That thing was a beast.
Gonna love them bonus videos.
I still use a Phenom II X4 955 95watt model for gaming in my little SFF pc in the living room. It's an old Emachines EL1352 with 16GB DDR3 1600MHz and a single slot low profile GTX 1050Ti 4GB card. It still runs anything I throw at it at very decent settings.
Still using a 965 now...sure I dont play fps shooters but it's a solid processor even now for strategy games which are my main genre. Never had an issue with it
Hard to believe I bought the same CPU over nine years ago and the tech is ten years old. It still ran fine before I was forced to replace it because the motherboard became unstable. Though you video makes me think I should try playing with the voltages to see if I can get it to be stable.
I own this CPU, also have GTX 1070 in the rig with 16 GB of RAM. It fares good for most games, but not for Star Citizen. Will get Ryzen 3700x when its released, hopefully it will be good 10 years like this Phenom was.
im still using a amd phenom ii x6 1055t on my spare system for friends to use running at 3.8 ghz with overclock. paired with a gtx 750 ti i can still play most AAA titles medium high :)
I've still got the 965 BE and have been using it daily since I got it in 2012-13 :) Next year will change probably but I'm happy with the Phenom.
Thank you for this video! You put all my fears, concerns, and worries to rest and reaffirmed my hopes! I bought the phenom ii x4 960t 3.0GHz Quad-Core BE a few months ago for a budget build and a mobo ASUS M4A87TD (48.99 But so worth it, the features of this mobo are just dirty) with a core unlocker, converted it to a 6 core (yes..you read that right..A Quad core turned into a Six core). I also found the AMD only ram and it came at the 1866 mhz 8gb sticks for 17 bucks each! (Bought 2 sticks of 1866 at 8gb each and bought 2 sticks of 1866 at 4gb each) Reason for the 2 different sizes is because I built two systems. My gaming friend kinda cooked his system (let's just say he kinda...didn't have any fans in the case...) and I was building a spare system for him. I bought a AMD Phenom II X3 B77 CPU Processor Triple-Core 3.2Ghz/ 6M /95W paired with a Asus M4N68T LE V2 Desktop Motherboard that unlocks hidden cores. Turned a triple core into a quad core. The 3 core costs only 20 bucks and the mobo was 35 bucks. So if you want to keep it well within budget realm and the extra money can be used either in ram or in Video card, the core unlocker feature is a godsend. Yes, I did not spend a lot of money on a video card, in fact..i spent lunch money compared to this video. (what...I'm trying to build a true budget systems for myself and my friend =) to goof off on, it's not a replacement as my main. Hell, my main is even considered old by today's standards.) I ended up buying a GTX 560 Ti off of good ole Ebay for $35 bucks for the "4" core 8gb system that runs a 500 Watt EVGA power supply I scored on a Christmas sale for 23 Clams. As for the "6" core 16 gb system, it runs the same power supply, since I have activated more cores. It means more juice being sucked in. The gpu I had lined up for it was a Sapphire OC 7870 2gb but if the 500 watt can't dance with it, I did score a back up plan in a XFX Ghost Edition 1gb DDR5 R7700 for 25 clams off of Ebay to keep the price down on the build. We wanted the systems to run linux OS because we wanted to prove to my dipshit brother (who has his head up his ass that you can't game on AMD or On Linux) that there is more to life then Windows and World of Warcraft. Oh, and I even went out and nabbed the old 90's unicomp Battleship spring keyboard with the extra key's to keep it old school. It even has F1-F24, which will allow me to reprogram the added F keys for gaming versus buying a new gaming board with the added keys. 35 clams for a mechanical board with extra keys for macros or hot keys and you can bludgeoning someone to death because it's that heavy and sturdy... yes... I'll take that all day. I know I could have done a 775 build or a Xeon build, but I never got a chance to play with the core unlocker's when they came out and how fucking cool is it to be able to buy a 30 dollar quad core (35 for the BE) and Shazam! It's now a Six core! Six cores tend to run around 50-60 bucks and you have to admit, that is a decent money saver that you can either invest into whole sticks of ram or like what I did; bought a video card with the money I saved. Shit, you can buy 256 gb SSD or two 128 gb SSD and run them in raid zero. For a little system, you can have a blast with it and you can build the whole system for under 150-170 smackers (pending what mobo or how crazy you go). Since I love this channel and Endgame came out and i'm still heartbroken over that movie. I'm going to be nice and share this. If you want the list of the AMD cpu's with hidden cores, and you want to build a little budget beater. Here's the list of AMD CPU's with hidden cores. www.cpu-world.com/info/AMD/Unlocking_cores_and_L3.html
Just remember, one of you owes me a pint of Guinness.
There was an issue on many Gigabyte boards overshooting the voltage, all the way to 2016 mobos.
I've heard this happens while running a 9900K on their z370 Aorus Gaming 7, too. So a 2017 board with 2018 BIOS updates.
Got that CPU with an ASRock 970 pro 3 motherboard in 2012. Both still running just fine. I don't game with the system though. With an SSD and 16 GBs of RAM I never have any problems with anything. Especially on Linux it's like running a workstation.
I am still using Phenom II X2 555 unlocked to X4 B55@3.7GHz/1.375mV since 2010. :)
I got this amd model in my PC build I cobbled together in the year 2010... my poor cpu endured countless hours of gaming with quite some dust and cat hairs in the air, close to the radiator and even got to see some sunlight in his days. Even went probably about 3 years with dried up cooling paste (my bad). Still going strong this soldier of a processor. Can firmly recommend it :D
although you really start to notice the age when playing more demanding games (or poorly optimized ones)
Duuuuude a few years ago I had an x4 955, and I was able to push a 4.0GHz overclock on, using the +50mV offset that was provided by ASUS on the board I was using, which gave a HWInfo readout of about 1.375V. It was okay, but there was a lot of 'necking in some titles. I couldn't get more than 20FPS in BeamNG.drive, and that didn't change across my upgrades from a sad GF210, to a 9800GT, to a GTX750. I replaced the set with a full Ryzen B350+1700+2x8GB DDR4-3000 kit and haven't looked back.
I had a Phenom II 955 Black Edition back then; was a really nice processor for the time. I remember getting a pretty decent overclock out of it too, though I can't remember exactly what I got up to at this point.
My proc! I had this chip. I loved it. It was a stop gap upgrade from an Athlon 64 X2 5800+ (Windsor core 2.8 Ghz). I was able to get 3.9 Ghz with 1.4v. It was a great CPU for the time I used it and I was happy with it. I had a GT 9600 1GB, then an HD 6870 1GB that was RMAd into an HD 7850 2GB. Great card for that CPU. If a bit overkill. Played all the Batman games of the time on it and it was a great experience. So was Darkstalkers.
I had a system with a phenom 955 and it performed more or less identically to a Q9450 and an i3 2120. I actually had a very entertaining afternoon comparing the 3 systems with the same graphics card and seeing the performance. My only complaint about the 955 was it ran hot on my asrock board so perhaps it was seeing a little too much voltage. As i have now sold the board/cpu i cant go back and check but certainly that combo served me well for many years.
Cool vid, I'd only add they made plenty of 95w Phenom II quads you can get for pretty cheaply if you want to lower the power draw a bit further. The wife is still running a 95w Phenom II 925 and for games like World Of Warships? Works just fine and doesn't heat up the place.
I'm using X3 720BE@3.4 GHz and it still runs quite well with recent games.
965 BE was my first multiply clocker, great CPU.
My PC that I built in HS had one of these for the longest time. I finally upgraded it to a Phenom II X6 1055T like 4 months ago
Upgraded from this to a 2500K. If you asked me to go back, I'd tell you where to stick it. However, for what it was, it served me well alongside my HD 5850 in Bad Company 2.
Also, I think the real star of the show is the Vulkan API. That would be a great video idea Phil. Using games that properly use DX12 and Async Compute, and Vulkan, on older CPU's with the RX 570. It'd be interesting to see how much the gains are on the older CPU's from DX11 API.
One last thing, Everspace sure reminds me a lot of Freespace 1 and 2.
An i5 2500K is still an excellent cpu. All that matters is OCing it properly and putting it with a graphics card it deserves. I am beginning to think I should upgrade my GTX 670 2 GB card as the other day I ran into problems with a game but then again it was on Origin and every other game I have played has run fine enough for me. Also not liking hearing that common coil whine with the GTX 670 that was quite common. Finally it is getting on my nerves. Looking at the RX 570s there are some that are not priced bad despite the poor dollar and competition getting worse in Canada with NCIX going away but I generally like to buy Nvidia so not sure about the RX 570. Anyway ...
My 965 pulls a miserly 135W on Cinebench, and hits an absolute idle of 64W (80+ Bronze PSU) - I've reverted it to non-OC as I pinched the 500W PSU and left it with a 300W - the FSP300-60GHN - wow what a PSU, 80+ bronze and able to deliver almost the full load on the 12V.
Previously, I had it at XMP 1600 RAM, Core OC to 975 level (avoid the half multipliers, the efficiency penalty makes them of little use), and the CPU NB OC to 2400 to balance the RAM (needed 1 tick of +V on core & 4 ticks on the NB)
Had this CPU until very recently, upgraded to a X6 for free (a fried gave it to me). It still performing very good, but games requiring SSE 4.1 and 4.2 I might have to upgrade soon.
I also have a Phenom II X4 970 in a slightly older Gigabyte motherboard that uses DDR2 memory. I also reduced CPU voltage to 1.264v and it not only uses less power but runs so much cooler -- rarely over 42c.
Woooooo, my baby!!! :) I have one of these. It was my main computer for years. Now its in my test bed.
Great video. I would go for the 775 platform though, as all the core2 quads have Supplementary SSE3 (SSSE3) support and the later ones have SSE 4.1. Some stuff just won't run at all without these instruction sets present. The 771 Xeons work very well too.
So basically your telling me I just need more ram, a more expensive video card and a better cpu cooler? Gotcha. 8GB with a 660TI and rendering bluray videos. Nice to know that it was worth not upgrading all these years.
The 965 Black Edition was the first unlocked processor I ever had. For what I paid for the motherboard and processor combined, it was pretty good. I even managed to get the processor overclocked to somewhere between 4 and 4.3GHz.
Anything over 4Ghz is pretty rare on Phenom IIs before the Thuban chips. They usually hit the wall at 4Ghz.
I built my computer back in 2012 and I'm still rocking a Phenom II 965 BE with a AIO cooler on it. I use to over clock my CPU but now nothing I try works to over clock the CPU without my system crashing (Even a minor overclock of 100 MHz causes crashing on boot up even when the voltages are set pretty high)
Had a 955be which served me very well... the GPU couldnt quite keep up with the times so had to put it to pasture.
One of my favorite CPUs next to the Phenom II X6. It is still running my wife's PC (hand-me-down) on an ASUS Crosshair III Formula. I ran it at 3.8GHz for many years with a beefy cooler (Zalman CNPS9900A LED), still am. Its running at safe default settings now but I do have screenshots of my old non-default settings: 19x multiplier, 1.4v CPU, 1.375v NB VID, 0.1v CPU Extra-OverVolt, 1.85v RAM, 1300MHz @ 6-6-6-18-1T. Back then, I only had a Radeon HD 6670. I've been wanting to switch out her's with my unused X3470 PC and thanks to you, she would definitely benefit from the switch.
3 months ago i still had my fx 4170 which are about as fast as the 965 and i was playing games like gta 5 and dragon age 3 on here.I first played gta 5 when i still had my 9800gt 1gb on low :D
Hey Phil, I enjoyed watching your vid as always. Just wanted to share my experiences with this processor, as i just bought it for a budget project. First of all I got the same problem with my mobo as well (auto overvolting), and it doesn't support that big kind of voltage settings. The CPU used to overheat all the time and throttled to 800mhz on all Cores. The trick was the "power saving mode" in the BIOS options, to manually undervolt the CPU a bit. So if there is anyone else having similar issues with their CPU / mobo just give it a try. But you already explained that pretty well in your vid. And one more thing to mention: i used a pretty cheap asus mobo, which officially only supports CPU up to 95w tdp (m2n68- am plus), but you can also use the 965be on that one. Just update to the latest BIOS Version and deactivate the fail Start monitoring Option in the Boot menu. Keep it going, regards from germany
Thanks for the information!
Had the same overvolting issue with a 955 BE, easily sorted with an undervolt and mine was an early C2 stepping model without some of the cool'n quiet features, I think it was the number of p states but I cannot remember the specifics.
I too was able to significantly reduce the voltage at stock to make it well behaved enough to run on a stock 95W AM2 heatsink rather than needing the Hyper 212X on an AM2+ gigabyte motherboard.
I think that the BE editions were all over volted so that you just cranked the multiplier without needing to bother with Voltages. Also I think a lot of boards didn't have load line calibration setting and this is why we see such large overvolting at stock speeds, you're expected to overclock which would have Vdroop kick in to drop the voltage and without being able to tweak LLC, it was probably set in the bios to extreme when it detected a BE chip.
I don't recall seeing LLC settings in the bios, but the Vcore voltage was always reported to be higher than what I set. I never had the issue with voltages with my 1045T multiplier up locked chip on the same board, though I could still undervolt it by quite a bit or bclck overclock it to 3.2GHz or 3.4 with a voltage increase before it became unstable. Though there were higher stable bclck states, but you had to find them as it would crash at 230 but be good at 235 only to crash at 236 then be good again around 245. Fun times, especially finding the just right setting so that both core and memory were stable.
While you are using an AM3 board, these chips did really well on AM2+.
I remember back in the day I got the Athlon 2 X4, and deeply regretted it. The Phenom 2 had been out a while when I bought my computer, but I wanted to save a few bucks. At some point I upgraded my video card to a 650ti, which came with Assassin's Creed 3, but my CPU just couldn't handle it, even at the lowest settings. In hind sight it's not a big loss, since the game sucked, but at the time I REALLY wanted to play it, and just couldn't. I think all AMD CPUs at the time struggled with it, but the Athlon 2 especially did.
This video just goes to show how much better the Phenom was than that POS.
Definitely the game and not that CPU. I've got a friend who has been gaming on the Athlon 2 to this day, and the lack of L3 cache (Main difference between these chips) didn't make a big difference.
@@TheDemocrab There were a number of other games that just ran horribly. Off the top of my head, I think I remember Dirt 2? Or maybe the original? Can't remember, but I tried running one of them and just couldn't even hit 20FPS.
Guessing it might have been overheating quite a bit on the stock cooler due too the motherboard sending out too high voltage as phil explained here.
My athlon II x3 445 did that on a gigabyte 870a ud3, ran the processor in auto voltage at 1.4v+
But when undervolted i could run it stable at 1.25v in prime95 maximum heat & still be below the 62c temperature limit when earlier i was overheating playing something like metro 2033 with my HD 5770.
(Unlocked it too a quadcore & ran it at 1.3v on the stock cooler fine as well.)
If i would have had better 1600 mhz ram at the time i built that pc i probably could have hit 3.8 - 3.9 ghz on the athlon II x3 445 when it was unlocked as a quad core, did 3.5 ghz on 1333 mhz ram which was still a decent boost with an arctic cooling freezer 13 pro (Removed the tiny white fan near the cpu base later as the bearing in that failed after 3 years i think.)
(no l3 cache & one bad temperature sensor which initially locked the processor too 800 mhz as it was going by the core temperature sensor rather then cpu socket sensor & essentially did a cpu temperature warning clocking the processor down too reduce temperatures that weren't real. Though after disabling hardware temperature monitor in the bios settings somewhere, (cant recall if it was under the stuff that showed the temperature in realtime & similar on the processor in the bios or somewhere else though.)
(The bad temperature sensor was stuck at between 73 - 83c depending on the load which ofc wasn't true when the processor was idling at 29c according too cpu socket temp heh.)
@@VuffyPulva Yeah, there's definitely something else going on there. An Athlon II quad core should be about as fast as a Q6600 in all regards: Slightly slower in terms of IPC, somewhat higher clocks that make up for it and a similar multi-thread ratio. (ie. How much faster a well threaded program is on one core vs all 4)
Compare to Phenom II that has similar but slightly better IPC, the same clock speed benefit vs the 65nm Core 2 Quads and a faster multi-thread ratio due to the L3 cache being a much faster way of communicating from one core to another than the solution in the C2Q or Athlon II. (Where the fastest "shared" memory is the DDR2/3)
The best Athlon IIs were the dual core ones because they had 1MB L2 cache. The 3 and 4 core versions only had 512K.
So far, the Phenom II can still play any game you throw at it.
....except it literally can't as it's missing instruction sets
so Apex Legends is out
Still have an 1090T somewhere.
This video makes me want to overclock it
one of the last cpu's not to be backdoored, good for a privacy build
4ghz is possible on these chips. Also, the aforementioned northbridge overclocks make a big difference. It's quite a bit faster than a Core 2 Quad if it's overclocked properly.
I had a 955 BE and later a 1100T in my second pc between 2016 and 2018... I'm a little bit sad that I sold them but I don't really have any need for a second PC anymore... I would be kind of interested in building a system with a 960T one day...
I think I may have had that exact same motherboard. I had a Phenom 2 X4, but I cannot remember if it was the 965 or a lower number like the 955 or 945. I remember having an RoG Radeon graphics card and logged many many hours of World of Warcraft on that thing. I had an ASUS Xonar Essence ST sound card driving some Klipsch Promedia 2.1 speakers and for the display I was using a Vizio 32 inch high definition television.
Stealth auto CPU overvolting has been around for a long time to sell the dishonest idea that OCing is a quick and painless job to noobs, instead of the time-consuming iterative process it has always been especially if you want to optimize your GHz/volts.
Hey Phil, have you ever thought about covering any of the original Phenoms? They seem to be completely forgotten about and there's not many videos on TH-cam covering the original Phenoms. Phenom II seems to get most of the attention. It would be very exciting to see you test some original Phenoms!
I'll see what I can do.
I have the same processor and motherboard. It would be cool to test "not-so-modern" games with onboard graphics too. Good report tough!!
great review.. never would of thought that default bios voltages would ever use higher voltages and maybe cause the overheating of some of the CPU's ive considered garbage temps.. now i have learned to keep a keen eye on voltages even when loading optimized defaults everytime i build a Computer.
I bought a 960T back when it was new.. I was able to unlock it to a x6.. I was running it in my 2d pc up in tell maybe 2 years ago. I think it oc'ed to 3.7 on all 6, but 3.5 on stock volts for all 6.
what motherboard you use
@@mzs9293 asrock 870 extreme3
K10.5 really was a good architecture. Using fewer transistors it's neck and neck with Core2. Too bad it was released two years too late :(