First Look: AMD Phenom II X4 970 BE

I recently got in the new Phenom II X4 970 BE. I have not had that much time to work with it, but I will be giving a first look into its perfomance stock and overclocked. BE stands for Black Edition. And that is AMD's version with an unlocked multiplier. The unlocked multiplier makes it that much easier to overclock. Due to time constraints, I went old school and worked within the BIOS. With just a few clicks to up the multiplier and voltage, I was overclocking. A word of caution with overclocking- I would not recommend it using the stock cooler. I was able to reach 3.818GHz air cooled without any difficulty, but overclocking eats power. And that translates to heat. So if you want to overclock, get a nice cooler. And here are a few early benchmarks that look pretty good. I used 3DMark Vantage. The stock setting of 3.5GHz gave 11,950 CPU marks, and overclocked at 3.818GHz yielded 13,070 CPU marks. Not bad.