AMD's Six-Core Phenom II X6 1090T & 1055T Reviewed
by Anand Lal Shimpi on April 27, 2010 12:26 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- AMD
- Phenom II X6
The Performance Summary
At $199 and $285 the obvious comparison points are Intel’s Core i5 750 and Core i7 860. We’ll dive into the complete performance tests in a bit, but if you’re looking for some quick analysis here’s what we’ve got.
Single threaded performance is squarely a Lynnfield advantage. Intel’s quad-cores can turbo up more and Intel does have the advantage of higher IPC.
| Phenom II X6 vs. Intel's Lynnfield Processors | |||||||
| Cinebench R10 (Single Threaded) | Cinebench R10 (Multithreaded) | 3dsmax r9 | x264 HD - 2nd Pass | Left 4 Dead | |||
| AMD Phenom II X6 1090T | 3951 | 18526 | 13.7 | 28.5 fps | 127.2 fps | ||
| AMD Phenom II X6 1055T | 3547 | 16268 | 12.7 | 25.1 fps | 111.5 fps | ||
| Intel Core i7 860 | 4490 | 16598 | 15.0 | 26.8 fps | 131.0 fps | ||
| Intel Core i5 750 | 4238 | 14142 | 13.4 | 21.0 fps | 130.0 fps | ||
Highly threaded encoding and 3D rendering performance are obviously right at home on the Phenom II X6. The 6MB L3 cache and lower IPC does appear to hamper the Phenom II X6 in a couple of tests but for the most part if you need threads, the X6 is the way to go.
Applications in between generally favor Intel’s quad-cores over the Phenom II X6. This includes CPU-bound games.
None of this should be terribly surprising as it’s largely the same conclusion we came to with the Athlon II X3 and X4. If you run specific heavily threaded applications, you can’t beat the offer AMD is giving you. It’s the lighter or mixed use workloads that tend to favor Intel’s offerings at the same price points.
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chrnochime - Tuesday, April 27, 2010 - link
Even with the 930 being 200 at MC(I got one nearby so yes I know that), X58 motherboards are still more expensive overall. The cheapest is 160+, and goes to 400. The thing is with x58, just finding a decent board that doesn't have a bunch of weird problems voiced by owners on forums/newegg is very very difficult. One has to either spend around 300 to perhaps have a higher chance of buying a relatively problem-free board, or just pray the board that arrives doesn't have one of the memory slot DOA(seems to plague quite a few mobos).I don't think the situation is anywhere nearly as bad on AM3 side.
Too bad it's not like the old days (5+ years ago) when boards would just WORK without having to eff around to even keep it stable at stock speed.
vectorm12 - Tuesday, April 27, 2010 - link
I'd really like to see how the 1055T stacks up in terms of overclocking ability.Seems to me as if the 1055T overclocked to around 3.4-3.6 GHz would result in a good stepstone from the current Phenom X4 (non black edition) lineup.
Etern205 - Tuesday, April 27, 2010 - link
Just to give a heads up that Maxxon released a new Cinebenchversion R11.
Roland00 - Tuesday, April 27, 2010 - link
If you are building a new system, of course you will want to use DDR3 memory for there is little to no price difference between the two.But some people have older systems. I wouldn't be surprised if people are upgrade from their AMD 5000+ or 6000+ and they have a compatible motherboard and memory. I am just wondering how much of a bottleneck is the DDR2 and will it cause any rational not to do a partial upgrade but instead a full upgrade.
It doesn't have to be all the tests, just a couple.
Taft12 - Wednesday, April 28, 2010 - link
IIRC the tangible performance benefit from DDR3 over DDR2 is in the range of 2%Higher speed but higher latency.
Goopfruit - Tuesday, April 27, 2010 - link
w00t! Go Netburst!xD
LoneWolf15 - Tuesday, April 27, 2010 - link
That my Q9450 clocked to QX9770-spec is still very competitive.I think it will be awhile before I change platforms, especially what with Intel planning socket changes for 2011. By then, we should see some more interesting options and maybe DDR3 will drop in price --I can always dream.
bigboxes - Tuesday, April 27, 2010 - link
When testing your 1366 i7 CPUs you need to use 6gb of ram. Why? Because they can utilize that extra bandwidth for increased performance. You stated that early on, but since 1156 came out your tests have been only with 4gb of ram. Drop 6gb of ram in the 1366 and retest. I'm sure that is what most 1366 owners are using in their systems.Anand Lal Shimpi - Tuesday, April 27, 2010 - link
In order to keep memory size constant we use 4GB on all systems (4x1GB on the LGA-1366 boards). You get full triple channel access for the first 3GB of memory, only the final 1GB is limited to dual channel. It's the only compromise we could come up with short of giving LGA-1366 a memory size advantage.The vast majority of our tests fall in the 2 - 3GB range, so I don't believe we're holding back the Nehalem/Gulftown performance much if at all here.
Take care,
Anand
Makaveli - Tuesday, April 27, 2010 - link
if most of the benchmarks use only 2-3GB's what differenece then does it make to have the i7 with 6gb of ram?