Overclocking
Taking any Black Edition CPU on an overclocking trip is easy mainly because all you have to do is bump up the multiplier and see what happens. If it won’t boot at a particular multiplier, just add more voltage till it does. Here’s what we found out about our X6 1099T.
Based on our attempts, we were able to come up with a mostly stable overclock of 4.1 GHz for all six cores with a little too much voltage (1.6 volts) in my humble opinion. However, temperatures were still within normal parameters, idling at 19 C and reaching 47 C at its worst. I say mostly stable because, while it was stable for benchmarking, it would not remain stable for the Premiere Pro CS4 rendering test. If it fails for a real world test, then it’s not really stable despite the success with the canned benchmarks. Games however seemed to be OK though, but they do seem to benefit more from the higher clock speed than the addition of the two extra cores as observed in the tests.
I was really impressed with the increase in the Cinebench 11.5 CPU test score overclocked. The overclock took it from 5.65 pts to 7.09 pts at 4.1 GHz. This puts it directly ahead of a much more expensive $949 Core i7 975 at 6.15 pts and right behind INTEL’s $1049 6-Core 980x at 8.64 pts. That’s definitely impressive for a CPU that’s less than one third the price of the Core i7 975. If AMD can get some better yields out, we’ll be looking at some hopefully stable 4.0 GHz six guns from AMD in the very near future at continued affordable prices.
Final Thoughts
AMD has really done it again. They’ve brought us the best mix of features and performance and provided them to us at the best possible price. Never would I ever had thought that we could get to a 6-core CPU for $209.99 US (for the 1055T). The 1090T is even more impressive given that extra performance that can be squeezed out of it for gaming duties and benchmarks at only $309.99 US. Both of which are substantially cheaper than any of INTEL’s 6-Core CPUs and still cheaper than even INTEL’s top hyper threaded Core i7 quad cores.
While ultimate performance still doesn’t compare to INTEL’s top drawer, AMD definitely provides the best bang for the buck by far. If you think about it, you could build a whole system for the price of one of INTEL’s top chips. Although it’s unlikely that you’ll drop your INTEL rig and come to AMD at this point if you already have a Core i7. If you’re already an AMD user, the new 6-cores are definitely an attractive proposition. But it would totally depend on how you use your existing system as to whether or not you’d see any benefit to adding a couple more cores.
Based on the benchmarks so far, we can pretty much conclude that the things that benefit most from AMD’s Phenom II X6 1099T 6-Core CPU are video rendering and any application where heavy computations are needed. Animation, CAD, and other heavily threaded and demanding programs would totally benefit. Where things aren’t so great are in games where we’ve taken a number of known multi-core friendly games and have found that they seem only optimized up to four cores. The 6-core chips are just reaching the market and it was only recently that game developers have really even embraced quad core CPUs and optimized for them. I suspect that it will still take some time till the games catch up to the hardware.
With full support for over 160+ existing motherboards via a BIOS update, the Phenom II X6 1090T is definitely desirable for anyone upgrading from a dual core and was thinking about a quad core. If you can use it to its potential, then it’s definitely the one to go for given all its performance benefits. Budget users looking for all the value they can muster would be hard pressed to find a better value for a complete high performance 6-core system for around a $1000. Well done AMD!
Pros
- 6-cores for $295 US!
- Unmatched performance at this price point
- Over 160 existing AMD motherboards supported with just a BIOS update
- You can build a whole high performance 6-Core workstation/gaming machine for under $1000!
Cons
- You might find yourself buying one even though you don’t need one!
Overall Rating: 9.5 / 10.0
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