AMD Phenom II X4 965  vs FX 4300 

I'm still using my 965 BE, and is absolutely gorgeous for gaming even for modern games like Rainbow Six Siege and Deus Ex Mankind Divided. I had only to upgrade my graphics card, and the 965 have all the power to run smoothly all the modern games I use! ^_^ It's a really amazing processor!

The 965 Black Edition is by far one of my favorite AMD processors. It has been in my gaming station for 5 years+ and I have yet to see the need to upgrade I'm very surprised to say the least. It's been running stable for years at 221x17.5 ~3.9 GHz (was able to do 3.7GHz+ stable with the stock cooler!) I would be stable at 4.0~4.1 especially with my Hyper 212 evo, my memory and MB can handle it but alas my cheap 5+ years old 750W Thermaltake TR2 can't handle to give the juice to it and the 7950(especially when the 7950 is at 1GHz) so I'm happy with 3.9GHz that 0.1 GHz is just for e-peen no one is gonna notice the difference just the synthetic benchmarks will if at all. I have the 965 paired with an ASUS M4A79XTD EVO MB also a very old motherboard, I have just recently upgraded my graphics to an HIS Radeon HD 7950 3GB 384-bit interface (overclocked to 1GHz), original GPU in my system for 4 years+ was an 5770 XFX XXX OC 1GB 128-bit also a great card when overclocked the system was able to handle Skyrim at Ultra running the 5770 stable at 990 MHz GPU / 1390 MHz Memory. In demanding games at 1920x1080 and Ultra settings like (BF4, Tomb Raider...etc) peak Processor usage on 4 cores didn't exceed %85 (usually at %65) and the 7950 stayed stable at %99, perhaps my motherboard's PCIe 2.0 ports are what's robbing that PCI-e 2.1 card of that last %1?? But I can tell it's definitely not the 965 holding back that %1. I haven't tried testing this at the stock 3.4GHz clock, but the results where nearly the same at 3.6GHz ~3.7GHz, which is an overclock almost any 965 can reach without touching Vcore even. All in all kudos to AMD I think I will keep this processor till I upgrade to a 4K display then I'll need that FX8350 upgrade for sure but for now for gaming at 1080p the 965 is just fantastic. I have never kept a processor in my system for more than 2-3 years I think this one I'm keeping for 7 and I really hope AMD will still be around by then? I'm glad I have an AM3 motherboard because if I had an AM3+ motherboard I would start making excuses to upgrade to an 8350, since my 7950 and 1866 ram would just move over to the new AM3+ motherboard and be right at home heck even my old PSU would too.