In a word: Well. They won’t blow your socks off the way they will when octa-threading, but all reviews are reporting modestly improved performance from the 965XE over the QX9770 even if most of your threads are twiddling their transistors. For example, four of the reviewers mentioned above (Hexus didn’t include this result) reported increases of 7%, 12%, 10% and 15% when running the single thread version of Cinebench.