AMD has a long tradition of improving already good products. In this case they have reworked the Phenom 2 X4 965 BE from 140w to 125w. What does that mean to the end user, well the new Phenom 2 X4 965 should work on almost any AM2+ or AM3 board while the old Phenom 2 X4 965 will only work on motherboards that support 140watt CPU's.

It uses a little less power but essentially it is the same CPU that uses less power. While we didn't have to run the full suite of benchmarks on the Phenom 2 X4 965 125w CPU and were told that a news story would be sufficient we decided to bench it like a demon and see if the lower TDP had impaired the performance any.

Lets take the new lower TDP Phenom 2 X4 965 for a spin and see if less voltage has affected the highest out of the box frequency CPU in the world.

http://www.bjorn3d.com/read.php?cID=1724