Over the course of a few months in late 2007 and early-to-mid 2008, AMD unveiled their Spider platform, consisting of AMD-built desktop
processors, chipsets, and graphics cards, and refreshed said platform with faster processors and graphics cards. Fast forward to today, and AMD is doing the same thing, but this time with the newer, more powerful Dragon platform. It's like Deja Vu all over again, as they say.

Even though some components have been available for much longer, the complete Dragon platform--consisting of Radeon HD 4000 series graphics, 7-series chipsets, and Phenom II processors--has been around since January of this year, when the Phenom II first arrived. Since the initial launch, AMD has updated the GPU portion of the platform with the Radeon HD 4890, i.e. RV790, and introduced mainstream socket AM3 processors. And today, AMD ups the ante yet again with the highest clocked quad-core CPU to be offered by the company to date, the 3.2GHz Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition.

We've got one of AMD's new flagship desktop processors in house for a little benchmark action and have clocked it down to 3.0GHz as well to simulate the performance of the Phenom II X4 945, which is also arriving alongside the 955 BE. Read on for the full scoop...