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.

AMD’s Turbo: It Works AMD’s 890FX Chipset & The Test
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  • kenupcmac - Wednesday, December 1, 2010 - link

    so now amd x6 is better for 3dmax compare to intel i7?
  • Wabid Wabit - Tuesday, December 28, 2010 - link

    Please check the site out, it is not a Intel Fanboy site or a AMD Fanboy site, but has the info you need, this page was an old post but the site has the info from then and now and it looks like - wait for it - wait for it - Intel just plain kicks ass - and all us Computer Geeks know that.

    http://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html
  • azizul.hoque - Monday, January 17, 2011 - link

    Hi,
    Can I use this processor for 3D studio MAX?
  • tipoo - Saturday, May 7, 2011 - link

    Of course you can use it.
  • superccs - Saturday, June 11, 2011 - link

    I have disabled the middle 2 cores on my 1055T (240Mhz FSB auto voltage, CnQ, and Turbo enabled) and it works quite well at bringing down temps when gaming. When turbo core is active the voltage of all cores goes up to 1.475, so disabling the cores saves power and temps.

    This works well in the summer, during the winter all heaters are enabled.
  • rustamveer - Friday, July 29, 2011 - link

    sir i wanted to upgrade my pc with amd phenom2 1090t and i' m new to amd processors.
    but sir please suggest me which motherboard i will choose i don't know much abt motherboard????
    please also tell me the price rate in india of phenom2 1090t and motherboard????????
    i will be very thankful to you....waiting for you reply!!!!!!!
  • archangel2003 - Saturday, February 4, 2012 - link

    Sounds a lot like the cycle magazines touting one bike having 1.5 HP more than the other, but really, how much riding is done nearly bouncing off the rev limiter?

    Same thing with these chips.
    How often are you going to experience the slight difference between these top of the line "at it's limits" Intel chip compared to the AMD at 1/3 the price?

    I think the point of the article was that the huge cost savings of an AMD offsets the slight difference in performance.

    BTW, all my computers have Intel only because that ia what they had in them, and if in the future I needed to make a choice, I would need better info like this article offeres.

    I could have went with the AMD 6 core for less than my i7 IntelQuad core cost!
  • Somebody23 - Tuesday, September 17, 2013 - link

    I have managed to push my 1090T to 4.2ghz all cores. it was mostly stable on benchmark.

    Downgraded 100mhz to 4.1ghz. It's stable at 4.1ghz computer doesnt bluescreen in 3 hours stability test.

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