Phenom II X6 Compatibility, Over 170 Boards Supported at Launch
by Anand Lal Shimpi on April 27, 2010 11:07 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- Phenom II X6
- Motherboards
Earlier today AMD announced its Phenom II X6 processors. One vendor even started offering them at a huge discount if you're willing to put up with a mail in rebate. The X6 is quite possibly the most affordable route to tons of threaded compute power. If you do a lot of video encoding or offline 3D rendering, for $150 you can't beat the deal TigerDirect is running on the 1055T. And it looks to be a beast of an overclocker.
The new X6s are supposed to work in all Socket-AM2+ and Socket-AM3 motherboards, all you need is a BIOS update. Many of you asked for a performance comparison between AM2+ and AM3 with the X6, but I quickly realized that none of the boards I had around the lab supported the chip. I decided to do a quick survey of all of the motherboard manufacturers to see who was ahead of the game on enabling Phenom II X6 support:
| AMD Phenom II X6 Support at Launch | ||||||||
| ASRock | ASUS | Biostar | ECS | Gigabyte | MSI | |||
| Number of AM2+ Boards Supported at Launch | 10 | 19 | 7 | 16 | 4 | 11 | ||
| Total Boards Supported (AM2+/AM3) | 28 | 37 | 23 | 26 | 43* | 22 | ||
ASUS and Gigabyte lead the charge with 37 and 43 boards supported at launch. The star next to Gigabyte's number means that you'll have to do some digging to find all of the Gigabyte boards with support. The CPU supported list only lists 10 boards but if you dig through Gigabyte's BIOS pages you'll find a lot more. In terms of older AM2+ boards, ASUS and ECS support 19 and 16 respectively. AMD tells us that the priority is to enable AM3 motherboards so over the coming weeks we'll see the AM2+ numbers climb.
Have any of you pulled the trigger on a Phenom II X6 purchase? What board are you pairing it with? Leave your experiences in the comments!
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jabby - Wednesday, April 28, 2010 - link
The cheapest fermi card is 349+7.49 shipping http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8... adding $30 for badaboom which supports only 2 output profiles http://store.nvidia.com/DRHM/servlet/ControllerSer... Getting a new processor is a better option. Plus you can do more with it.Pirks - Wednesday, April 28, 2010 - link
Getting CPU is better because it costs 2x less and works 20x slower? Hahaha :) Thanks, was a good laugh.chrnochime - Wednesday, April 28, 2010 - link
This taken from their blog just now:Output Audio Formats
AAC-LC (2 channel)
Wow look at that; All that speed with just 2 channel stereo output!! It's like we're back in the 90's again, rockin' the 1080P and a sweet sweet 2 channel (not even 2.1, just 2!!) audio. Oh yeah.
Still think all that Badaboom is all that Pirk?
Pirks - Wednesday, April 28, 2010 - link
www.mediacoderhq.communch on yet another GPU video encoder now sonny :P
chrnochime - Wednesday, April 28, 2010 - link
So instead of responding to my post about the oh-so-sweet 2.0 audio with badaboom, you change topic and throw out another completely different encoder. Come on, where's your witty response with regard to the 2.0 audio? I'm still waiting here. Gonna tell me that 2.0 is eons better than 2.1/5.1/7.1?WTH does that mediacoderhq have to do with Badaboom? Oh rhetorical question what was I thinking.
Try harder next time.
Pirks - Wednesday, April 28, 2010 - link
Maybe you gotta check how many audio channels this GPU powered mediacoder supports sonny? ;) Just give it a try will ya? Don't be afraid, hehehemmp121 - Wednesday, April 28, 2010 - link
I kid, I kid, but could you imagine if I could replace my X2 4600+ in my Asus M2N-SLI Deluxe (AM2+) with one of these.l8gravely - Thursday, April 29, 2010 - link
Sigh, I've got an M2N-SLI Deluxe as well. Great board which I wish I could upgrade. Maybe an X4 will fit in there? I really need a new server, but that's a whole new build and I'm not quite ready to pull the trigger there yet.John
bikermatt - Wednesday, April 28, 2010 - link
I had a 1055T on friday but my Foxconn A7DA 3.0 would not even post. I recieved a MSI 790FX-GD70 yesterday and so far it is working great.Bikermatt
02J - Wednesday, April 28, 2010 - link
No support for the ASUS M4A79XTD. ASUS did release a new BIOS for it a short time ago that listed "Support new CPUs" as the only release note, but it isn't listed.