Gaming Performance

None of the games here can take advantage of more than 4 cores. The Phenom II X6 ends up performing no different than a Phenom II X4. Thankfully due to Turbo Core you rarely see a drop in performance compared to the Phenom II X4 965.

If you want the better gaming chip, you want Lynnfield.

Fallout 3 - 1680 x 1050 - Medium Quality

Left 4 Dead - 1680 x 1050 - Max Settings (No AA/AF/Vsync)

Crysis Warhead - 1680 x 1050 - Mainstream Quality (Physics on Enthusiast) - assault bench

Batman: Arkham Asylum

Dragon Age Origins

Dawn of War II

Archiving Performance Power Consumption
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  • Scali - Wednesday, April 28, 2010 - link

    I think people buying an Extreme Edition CPU know exactly what they're getting themselves into.
    Those CPUs are never good price/performance, you pay a premium to get the absolute fastest CPU on the market, that's the whole point of the Extreme Edition concept.

    Obviously Intel isn't going to offer only one expensive 32nm six-core forever. Perhaps this X6 CPU will trigger Intel to release more 'mainstream' six-cores and other 32nm CPUs.
  • JGabriel - Tuesday, April 27, 2010 - link

    For home use, yes. For professional use, that 48.8 frames/second on the 980x vs. 28.5 on the 1090T, for x264 2nd pass encoding, looks quite justifiable. If that's your business, that'll pay for itself in a couple of weeks.

    .
  • pjconoso - Tuesday, April 27, 2010 - link

    Point taken. I was speaking for home users. ;)
  • pow123 - Wednesday, May 5, 2010 - link

    Exactly. A few seconds. I will not pay for an over priced processor for a few seconds. Keep it coming AMD.
  • Lolimaster - Tuesday, April 27, 2010 - link

    Watch tom's review
    http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-phenom-ii-...

    More justice to the AMD cpu's. Just pass the synthetic intel compiler bugged benchmarks.
  • haplo602 - Tuesday, April 27, 2010 - link

    Actualy the results are what I expected and what was also explained in the review. Not stellar, but very good for the money spent ...

    I guess I'll buy one of the 4-cores.
  • Hacp - Tuesday, April 27, 2010 - link

    Anand, why do you not try to push the chip on overclocking? Also, why not do an I7 overclocked vs Phenom X6 overclocked performance comparison? Overall, I feel that this review was pretty limited and unenthusiastic for such an exciting product.
  • ymetushe - Tuesday, April 27, 2010 - link

    Second this. I was really hoping you'd do some overclocked benchmarks, say at 4GHz, so that we could see clock for clock performance of 6 Thuban cores vs. 8 Bloomfield/Lynfield threads.
  • JGabriel - Tuesday, April 27, 2010 - link

    Check the x264 and Cinebench results. Clock for clock, at 2.8 Ghz, two hyper-threaded Lynnfield cores seems to match three Thuban cores - at least for rendering & encoding purposes.

    .
  • Anand Lal Shimpi - Tuesday, April 27, 2010 - link

    I try to provide a look at what sort of headroom you can get out of the chip while feeding it as little voltage as possible. The idea is to keep power consumption at a minimum while increasing performance. I found that the jump from 3.8 to 3.9GHz required quite a bit of additional voltage, while just going to 3.8GHz was basically a non-issue - which to me is more impressive than trying to squeeze another 100 - 200MHz out of the chip.

    Take care,
    Anand

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