The Phenom II X6 - AMD Replies with Six Cores

Test Setup

Test Setup

AMD recognizes that even with six cores, its Phenom II X6 processors will find Intel's more expensive offerings out of their performance and price bracket. Hence, the ideal price-competitive rivals for the Phenom II X6 1090T are the Core i7-930 and Core i7-860, which at US$295 and US$280 respectively, are closest to the US$289 retail price of the 1090T. Meanwhile, the US$199 Phenom II X6 1055T is pitted against Intel's mainstream Core i5-750, which is being sold at that price. For comparison's sake, we have also included results for AMD's current quad-core champ, the Phenom II X4 965 (US$186) and also Intel's 6-core Core i7-980X.

To find out the effects of Turbo Core on performance, we have also ran our benchmarks for the 1090T with and without Turbo Core enabled. While we believe that one should have Turbo Core enabled all the time, it would be interesting to find out how the 6-core fares without this new feature. Below are our test configurations and benchmarks.

AMD Phenom II X4/X6 Test Configuration

• ASUS Crosshair IV Formula (AMD 890FX + SB850, 0602 BIOS) for Phenom II X6 1090T (3.2GHz), 1055T (2.8GHz)
• MSI 790FX-GD70 (AMD 790FX + SB750) for Phenom II X4 965 (3.4GHz)
• 2 x 1GB Kingston HyperX DDR3-1333 (7-7-7-20)
• Zotac GeForce GTX 260 (ForceWare 178.24)
• Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 200GB SATA hard drive (one single NTFS partition)
• Microsoft Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2

Intel Core i7 Test Configuration

• Intel Core i7-930
• Gigabyte X58 Extreme (Intel X58 Express chipset) (F11 BIOS)
• 3 x 1GB Kingston HyperX DDR3-1333 (CAS 7-7-7-20)
• Zotac GeForce GTX 260 (ForceWare 178.24)
• Seagate 7200.10 200GB SATA hard drive (one single NTFS partition)
• Intel INF 9.1.0.1007 and Matrix Storage Manager 8.6.0.1007
• Microsoft Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2

Intel Core i5/i7 (Lynnfield) Test Configuration

• Intel Core i5-570, Core i7-860
• Intel DP55KG (Intel P55 Express chipset)
• 2 x 1GB Kingston HyperX DDR3-1333 (CAS 7-7-7-20)
• Zotac GeForce GTX 260 (ForceWare 178.24)
• Seagate 7200.10 200GB SATA hard drive (one single NTFS partition)
• Intel INF 9.1.1.1015 and Matrix Storage Manager 8.9.0.1023
• Microsoft Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2

Benchmarks

The following benchmarks were used in this review:

• SPECCPU 2000 v1.3
• BAPCo SYSmark 2007 Preview (ver 1.05)
• Futuremark PCMark 2005 Pro
• Lightwave 3D 7.5
• Cinebench 10
• Futuremark 3DMark06 v1.1
• AquaMark3
• World in Conflict v1.05
• Crysis v1.1