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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codedivine - Wednesday, April 28, 2010 - link
My Asus M3A78-CM AM2+ board is not on the list and I see no BIOS updates. So looks like I am SOL :(BPB - Wednesday, April 28, 2010 - link
I don't see any support at all listed at the ASUS website. The Phenom II X6 CPU's aren't even listed in the drop down for CPU selection. I'll think twice before I get an ASUS board again.http://support.asus.com/cpusupport/cpusupport.aspx
Taft12 - Wednesday, April 28, 2010 - link
Dude, THE LINK IS RIGHT IN ANAND'S POST!http://event.asus.com/mb/2010/m4_6cores/
Quit being so hasty to dump on a company when you can't find the info you want on the first day.
Sorry to the guy with the M3A- board, you are indeed SOL
arnavvdesai - Wednesday, April 28, 2010 - link
I bought the 1055T and am planning to buy a BioStar board. For 150$, it was a pretty cheap chip and bought it for a future build for my WHS. With the new version of the OS releasing soon I decided to hold off on other parts for the build. That way most manufacturers will get their BIOS updates sorted and I will be able to pick up a board without worrying about BIOS flashing and/or compatibility.Bal - Wednesday, April 28, 2010 - link
Any suggestions on a AM2+ with two full x16 pcie lanes? I have extra DDR2 memory laying around...Taft12 - Wednesday, April 28, 2010 - link
M4A79 Deluxehttp://ca.asus.com/product.aspx?P_ID=F8NXs2xIQloc5...
The latest BIOS update is from March of this year which likely added X6 support.
Maybe the Asus 980a board too? M4N82 Deluxe
Bal - Wednesday, April 28, 2010 - link
Thanks for the leads...!gimptech89 - Wednesday, April 28, 2010 - link
I actually jumped the gun and ordered a Gigabyte GA-890GPA-UD3H 2 weeks ago...throwing a Phenom II X6 1090T in it. probably gonna throw a 5850 or 5870 in there...eventually a second one... Building my first ever folding rig :P
jabby - Wednesday, April 28, 2010 - link
Will a FOXCONN A7DA-S support the X6?? I still using 9850BE and it's time to upgrade before moving to DDR3 and something newer.Pirks - Wednesday, April 28, 2010 - link
"If you do a lot of video encoding for $150 you can't beat the TigerDirect deal"That's idiocy 'cause you can buy a nice Fermi board and your video encoding with Badaboom will be faster TENFOLD if not more. Why waste money on a useless CPU for video encoding when you can have GPU video encoder that's like orders of magnitude faster?