The Rev. C3 Results
     I use two older Rev C2 Phenom IIs, the X4 955 and X4 965, for comparison.  The 965 I used is a bit cooler of a version than the one I reviewed several months ago.  I think in this case it was not nearly as representative as what most boxed X4 965s were able to do in terms of power consumption.

    The system is comprised of the Gigabyte GA-MA790FXT-UD5P, 2 x 2 GB OCZ Platinum DDR-3 1600 @ 7.7.7.24 timings, AMD HD 4970 512 MB video card, Seagate 1 TB 7200 RPM HD, Lite-On DVD-R/RW, and a Corsair TX750W power supply.  Windows 7 64 bit RTM is used as the OS, and a limited number of benchmarks are used to see if there were any glaring performance differences.

SiSoft Sandra

AMD Phenom II X4 965 Rev. C3: Taking Power Down a Notch - Processors 10

AMD Phenom II X4 965 Rev. C3: Taking Power Down a Notch - Processors 11

    Memory performance also was essentially the same for all three processors, going between 12.83 GB/sec and 13 GB/sec.

Power

AMD Phenom II X4 965 Rev. C3: Taking Power Down a Notch - Processors 12

    Idle power did favor the C3 chip by a small amount.  3 watts is not huge, but it is an improvement.

AMD Phenom II X4 965 Rev. C3: Taking Power Down a Notch - Processors 13

    At load we see a total of 5 watts between the old and the new.  Again, the original 965 that I am using now was a bit more power efficient than the original that AMD sent me months ago.  On average we can expect from 5 to 10 watts of “at the wall” difference between the two chips.

    In the end it does appear as though AMD has tweaked integer performance by a small amount, but otherwise performance was essentially the same.  The Rev. C3 chip did pull less power at load, but a difference of 5 watts with all four cores pegged does not necessarily constitute a paradigm shift in efficiency at AMD.

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