Phenom II X4 980 Black Edition processor

So then my righteous guru's...  I was just checking up on the initial Phenom II X4 releases and good gosh it was August 1st 2009 that AMD broke loose from the 1st generation Phenom mayhem. By releasing the Deneb based Phenom II X4 micro-architecture things where looking much better alright, a decent bump in performance, no TBL bug and decent priced processors.

It's now May 2011 and Llano and Bulldozer architectures are in close vicinity align with a series 900 (Socket AM3+) and AMD A75 (socket FM1), and all we can say it's about time!

The current Deneb core however over the past year and a half has been optimized and fine-tuned in many ways. As such, and honestly completely unneeded, AMD did decide to make their fastest Phenom II X4 processor even a slight bit faster, yes today they release their Phenom II X4 980 Black Edition processor, which clocks in at chill 3.7 GHz at default.

Tagged with a suggested retail price of $185 (USD) it's fair to say that this processor will compete with Intel's Core i5 2400/2500 series processors. Will the Phenom II X4 still pack enough punch to compete with Intel's super sexy Sandy Bridge processors?

We'll let's find out and head onwards into the review. But not before you have observed my supah-fly fine photography artwork of course ;)