Overclocking
So the Extreme Edition 965's performance at stock speeds is decent but unspectacular. Power consumption, however, is magically lower than the 955's. And it gets even better. Using a Zalman CNPS9500 LED cooler and a bump in voltage from the stock 1.3V to 1.4375V, I was able to overclock the 965 to a staggering 4.53GHz, simply by raising the CPU multiplier in the BIOS.
Holy cow!
The processor was stable at this speed while running four simultaneous instances of Prime95's torture test loop for 15-20 minutes, so I decided to go ahead and run some benchmarks.
When the Extreme Edition flips bits at 4.53GHz, its performance is directly in league with the Athlon 64 FX-60, even in UT2004, which has given this CPU microarchitecture nothing but fits over the years. I was curious to see what this massive overclock did for power consumption, so here are the numbers.
The C1E halt state brings the overclocked 965 back to 3.2GHz at idle, just like it does at stock speeds. However, the higher CPU voltage raises idle power consumption. Under load at 4.53GHz, the 965 doesn't exactly conform to the Kyoto protocol, but it could be worse—as the Extreme Edition 840 is.
