Reviews - AMD Phenom II X6 1075T and Phenom II X4 970 Black Edition CPUs

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AMD releases more chips to pressurise Intel's Core i7 CPUs.

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Read more.

The 970 BE is going to be a hard sell against the 1055T. £10 extra gives you 6 cores instead of 4, a boosted clock speed almost as high as the 970. Is the fact that it's Black Edition enough?

Probably not. It only takes a 7.5% clock nudge (to 215MHz base clock) for the 1055T to become a 3.0GHz / 3.5GHz Turbo chip, just like the 1075T. I can see the 1075T being used by system integrators though: not everyone will be comfortable with even that small an overclock. Can't see any reason for an enthusiast to look anywhere else though (particularly if they can get hold of a 95W 1055T...)

Which are currently on sale at OCUK I think for £165

And OEM from CCL for ~ £155ish. Shame I have no need to build a new computer at the minute, really ;)

Tarinder, a question if I may? How does a benchmark that is bottlenecked in each case by the GPU illustrate relative gaming performance across the compared CPUs in the review?

Scores seem a bit harsh, you've said far worse things about products and given them 4 stars. They may not be revolutionary but they seem to provide good bang-for-buck and beat the similarly priced Intel chips...

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Originally Posted by will101

Tarinder, a question if I may? How does a benchmark that is bottlenecked in each case by the GPU illustrate relative gaming performance across the compared CPUs in the review?

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I believe the point is to demonstrate that when you use resolution and image quality settings that are bottlenecked by the GPU it doesn't matter which CPU you choose - they're all about the same. As Tarinder says:

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This rather boring graph shows that most games don't care how many CPU cores are in the socket. It's all about GPU power once the resolution is dialled up.

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It strikes me that this is very useful information for someone who is buying a gaming PC...

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Originally Posted by jimbouk

Scores seem a bit harsh, you've said far worse things about products and given them 4 stars. ...

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I guess a less capable product could be worth four stars if it was filling a market niche, while a more capable product could be worth less if it was entering a crowded market without really offering anything distinctive? There's no compelling reason to buy either of these products over the incumbent 965BE and 1055T...

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Originally Posted by scaryjim

I believe the point is to demonstrate that when you use resolution and image quality settings that are bottlenecked by the GPU it doesn't matter which CPU you choose - they're all about the same. As Tarinder says:

It strikes me that this is very useful information for someone who is buying a gaming PC...

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Outside forums like this it might not be, but it should be well known that for games past a certain CPU power point you are better off spending additional money on graphics than CPU.

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Originally Posted by jimbouk

Scores seem a bit harsh, you've said far worse things about products and given them 4 stars. They may not be revolutionary but they seem to provide good bang-for-buck and beat the similarly priced Intel chips...

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As stated in the conclusion, it's the relative excellence of the surround AMD chips that make these new introductions seem positively average.

If it was my money, I'd buy an AMD Phenom II X6 1055T 95W or X6 1090T.

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Originally Posted by will101

Tarinder, a question if I may? How does a benchmark that is bottlenecked in each case by the GPU illustrate relative gaming performance across the compared CPUs in the review?

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Scaryjim kindly answered this, but it goes to show that informed users need to consider how allocating 'x' amount of resources will benefit their PC experience.

AMD's Phenom II X4 and X6 chips are good enough for most users' needs. Now if only Intel would drop the price on the 980X and 970 processors and make it interesting.

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Originally Posted by Tarinder

As stated in the conclusion, it's the relative excellent of the surround AMD chips that make these new introductions seem positively average.

If it was my money, I'd by an AMD Phenom II X6 1055T 95W or X6 1090T.

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Over say an i7 930?

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Originally Posted by redddraggon

Over say an i7 930?

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Right now, 1055T 95W is my recommendation as the best bang-for-buck chip. The 890FX platform's pretty solid too.

BFBC2 uses all 6 cores well on my 1090T - why not use that as a gaming benchmark, that can make use of more than 3 cores like most games....

I still find negativity in these AMD CPU reviews from Hexus - what gives? or is it just me? hmmm

Also - Cat 10.2 drivers!?!

Looking on AMD with negativity?

Last review was the 1055T 95W - http://www.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=26122&page=7

4.5 stars out of 5. Recommended award.

"Balancing pure performance, power-draw, and price in an enviable manner, the 1055T 95W becomes our favourite 'high-end' CPU, and we urge AMD to make it more widely available in the channel."

Previous review was the 1090T - http://www.hexus.net/content/item.ph...=24332&page=12

4/5 and recommended.

"Intel remains king with its Core i7 980X, but AMD's sudden hexa-core challenge has certainly spiced things up in the mid-to-high-end space."

We're not going to retest 12 CPUs for a launch of a new processor, unless it happens to be a brand-new architecture. :) This is why we keep a test platform at the ready, imaged up for processor reviews. All AMD chips are run with the same supporting components. The only difference a new driver may make is to the gaming test, which in this case is limited by the GPU.

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Originally Posted by scaryjim

And OEM from CCL for ~ £155ish. Shame I have no need to build a new computer at the minute, really ;)

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Just cock up the watercooling and tell your wife that it was bound to happen. Then spend at least £800 on a new PC. izi.

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Originally Posted by zoomee

I still find negativity in these AMD CPU reviews from Hexus - what gives? or is it just me? hmmm

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Where abouts, I must have read a different review.

In regards to idle power draw, I have an ASUS Motherboard that supports EPU6 (energy saving). Whilst currently listening to music, watching a youtube video and have several browsers open, the software claims my CPU is running around 8 watts, sometimes dipping to 6. Obviously not all motherboards have this technology and will differ slightly between brands, but if power drawer is a big factor in a buying decision choosing a better motherboard seems to cater more than enough for Intel's normal high watt rating, whilst also lowering AMD watt ratings.

It's probably just me but when reviews and pre-views (like that of the Thuban) start with the following comments it casts a bad start:

1090T review:
Starts:
"It's been a while since we've had our hands on an AMD CPU that has left us genuinely impressed"
Ends:
"Remains a distant second to Intel in terms of raw performance"

LOL - headline of the i7 930 was:
"Clocks like a champ; 4GHz should be easy as pie" - Most if not all 1090T's hit 4Ghz no probs aswell ;)

1055T review:
"AMD would rather charge you £500-plus for its top-of-the-line components, much as it did five years ago, but Intel's performance Core i7 chips, spanning £190-£780, keep AMD's pricing hemmed in."

We forgotten the price of the 980x at the moment from intel? - Price / performance wise these Thubans are pretty awesome.

No one ever seems to mention the fact that 6 cores gives more room for things like VM's either! - 4 dedicated to running a VM each AND two cores left over with plenty of grunt left for your own OS (which I find VERY useful running a testbed citrix environment ;) - hence my decision to go for 6 cores than stick with the 4 I had....Intel wouldda just broke the bank and before you mention HT - 'virtual cores' don't count :P

No mention of performance increases when overclocking the CPU-NB either - Thats where these Thubans are rocking over the Deneb cores - and this is where we see most gains when overclocking (for gaming) as the 2Ghz standard CPU-NB will be bottlenecking the 4Ghz overclocks....

Also - I'd like to see scaling on a properly multi-threaded game like BFBC2 - I seen a review on them back when the 1090T was launched and guess what the 1090T kept up with? Yup - The 980x! ;)

I think it was more so the the previews of the Thubans than the reviews which caught my eye as being negative.

Anyways - rock on fellas ;)

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Originally Posted by zoomee

It's probably just me but when reviews and pre-views (like that of the Thuban) start with the following comments it casts a bad start:

1090T review:
Starts:
"It's been a while since we've had our hands on an AMD CPU that has left us genuinely impressed"
Ends:
"Remains a distant second to Intel in terms of raw performance"

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The start just gives me the impression that this chip is something to write home about tbh. But anyway, it's well known that AMD comes in a definite second to Intel in terms of raw performance. IIRC, the quad cores (i.e. i7 920) are faster than AMD's hexa-cores (albeit not by much), and Intel's hexa-cores wipe the floor with them. Clearly the price-performance figures show a different story, but that doesn't conceal the fact that Intel's chips are faster.

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LOL - headline of the i7 930 was:
"Clocks like a champ; 4GHz should be easy as pie" - Most if not all 1090T's hit 4Ghz no probs aswell ;)

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That may be true, but stock speed is 3.2GHz instead of 2.8GHz. That means achieving 4GHz on a 930 is a 43% overclock whereas 4GHz on a 1090T is only a 25% overclock - much less of a feat, really.

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1055T review:
"AMD would rather charge you £500-plus for its top-of-the-line components, much as it did five years ago, but Intel's performance Core i7 chips, spanning £190-£780, keep AMD's pricing hemmed in."

We forgotten the price of the 980x at the moment from intel? - Price / performance wise these Thubans are pretty awesome.

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The 970/980x CPUs aren't the ones keeping AMD from charging £500+. They can only compete against Intel's high-mainstream. And yes, price/performance is very good - but it wouldn't be if Intel's chips weren't priced as they are.

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No one ever seems to mention the fact that 6 cores gives more room for things like VM's either! - 4 dedicated to running a VM each AND two cores left over with plenty of grunt left for your own OS (which I find VERY useful running a testbed citrix environment ;) - hence my decision to go for 6 cores than stick with the 4 I had....Intel wouldda just broke the bank and before you mention HT - 'virtual cores' don't count :P

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Why don't they count? Back in the P4 days HT offered a much smaller benefit than now - with ~70% performance boost IIRC. Hence quad-core i7s being faster in multithreaded scenarios than hexa-core Thubans :p

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No mention of performance increases when overclocking the CPU-NB either - Thats where these Thubans are rocking over the Deneb cores - and this is where we see most gains when overclocking (for gaming) as the 2Ghz standard CPU-NB will be bottlenecking the 4Ghz overclocks....

Also - I'd like to see scaling on a properly multi-threaded game like BFBC2 - I seen a review on them back when the 1090T was launched and guess what the 1090T kept up with? Yup - The 980x! ;)

I think it was more so the the previews of the Thubans than the reviews which caught my eye as being negative.

Anyways - rock on fellas ;)

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Surely BFBC2 is GPU-limited? Most games are. All that says really is if you want to play games - then spend your budget on graphics, not massively fast CPUs. I remember some of the earlier i7 reviews saying not to upgrade to play games, because the CPU speed just isn't that important.


I'm not really sure where you're coming from with most of your points, but never mind ;)

Well you talk about AMD charging £500+ for a CPU, but I still don't get why Intel can charge £900(!) for a cpu and no one bats an eye lid, yet still talk about AMD charging £500 for a cpu lol! hypocritical much?

Competition from both sides is a good thing for us consumers - As soon as AMD comes out with something which "trounces / wipes the floor with" (lol - just using your terms) Intel's corei7 stuff then Intel will drop its prices too.

All this talk about trouncing / wiping the floor - when you actually look at it there's not that much gain in it from either side - using synthetic benchmarks doesn't show the full picture.

btw - Your IIRC percentages are waaaaaay out for HT -check em again - 70& performance increase for HT??? lol. And IIRC I've read nightmare stories about the super high temps and having to switch off HT when trying to clock 930's to 4Ghz....google is your friend ;)

"Hence quad-core i7s being faster in multithreaded scenarios than hexa-core Thubans" - Actually they're not - apart from the usual intel optimised test's - they aren't - check other sites - Hexus isn't the only review site mate ;)

Anyways - Sorry hexus - this particular review thread is the wrong place to discuss this - I'll stop now :rockon:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...0x,2584-4.html

Biggest gain I see here is about 40% and that's in 2 benchmarks only. Most of the times it makeslittle to no difference.

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Originally Posted by nibbler

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...0x,2584-4.html

Biggest gain I see here is about 40% and that's in 2 benchmarks only. Most of the times it makeslittle to no difference.

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Are you referring to hyperthreading? If so then in most of those benchmarks it appears to have negligible effect (which confuses me but presumably because I don't know enough about how it works), and in the one benchmark it does have a major effect (measurement of GFLOPS) it gives a 63-64% increase in performance. So my figure of 70% improvement was a little out based on that one test. But looking elsewhere on Google gives a figure more akin to 10-40% boost for applications that benefit from it.

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Originally Posted by zoomee

Well you talk about AMD charging £500+ for a CPU, but I still don't get why Intel can charge £900(!) for a cpu and no one bats an eye lid, yet still talk about AMD charging £500 for a cpu lol! hypocritical much?

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Still don't really get what you're saying here, but never mind :)

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Competition from both sides is a good thing for us consumers - As soon as AMD comes out with something which "trounces / wipes the floor with" (lol - just using your terms) Intel's corei7 stuff then Intel will drop its prices too.

All this talk about trouncing / wiping the floor - when you actually look at it there's not that much gain in it from either side - using synthetic benchmarks doesn't show the full picture.

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Hmm.. well I'll give you this link (again first relevant link on Google), which in both benchmarks (not including gaming where things quickly become GPU-bound) looks to me to show the stock-clocked i7 980x to be faster in 3DMark06 CPU, and lots faster in Sandra DhryStone Test (which I've never heard of before), than the overclocked 1095T @ 4.1GHz. If that isn't trouncing, then what is? Currently AMD can't compete with that level of performance, which is why Intel can keep its pricing so high. It'd be great if AMD could, because like you say, it would make Intel drop its prices. But please do link to reviews that show your point about there being little in it, I'd be interested to read them. :)

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btw - Your IIRC percentages are waaaaaay out for HT -check em again - 70& performance increase for HT??? lol. And IIRC I've read nightmare stories about the super high temps and having to switch off HT when trying to clock 930's to 4Ghz....google is your friend ;)

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See above re the HT benefit (it looks to be significantly less than I thought in most cases). But tbh I don't understand how HT works sufficiently to explain its benefits/drawbacks. And sure.. you'll have to switch of HT if you're trying to o/c to 4GHz on the stock HSF :O_o1: but I'm not really sure what your point is here either :p
i7s are power-hungry processors, they will get very hot without proper cooling - and saying HT is bad because it can cause them to overheat when o/cing is a little silly because o/cing in itself can cause CPUs to overheat without proper cooling.

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"Hence quad-core i7s being faster in multithreaded scenarios than hexa-core Thubans" - Actually they're not - apart from the usual intel optimised test's - they aren't - check other sites - Hexus isn't the only review site mate ;)

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Here's the two relevant links from the first few that came up on a quick Google search (ones that compared Thuban to i7 920 at the same clock speed):

http://www.techreaction.net/2010/05/...thuban-review/ On this one, all bar two (I think) tests showed the i7 920 to be faster than the thuban. One one of the two that it was slower, it was by a very small margin. On the other, it was a large margin - but looking closer at the results, they don't tally up as you'd expect. i.e. they give results for stock speeds and o/c speeds and the % increase from Thuban 3.2 to 4.2GHz was ~30% increase whereas the % increase from i7 2.6GHz to 4.2GHz was just under 30% increase.. so not quite sure what's going on there.

The other: http://www.visualdreamers.com/news/p...n-core-i7-920/. You might expect an article with such a title to either have found thuban to be better than i7, or at least to be AMD fanboys, and yet their final comment is:

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We were pleasantly surprised how well the Phenom II X6 held up compared to the Intel processors. In some situations the Phenom II X6 even surpassed the 920 and closed in on the 980X.

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Anyway, if you can provide links to reviews showing Thuban to have a lead over the quad-core i7s clock-for-clock I'll be very interested :)

But there's no point in comparing an intel clock cyle to an intel clock cycle - they are different things. 3GHz intel does not equal 3 GHz AMD, they measure it differently (as in what 1 hz entails exactly). Similarly, they both use the phrase TDP (thermal design power) but they again measure this differently.

Overclocking the CPU-NB makes a very big difference to the performance of the Phenom II X6:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/3877/a...ance-scaling/7

Also,the fact is that a Phenom II X6 1055T and an AM3 motherboard is much cheaper than a socket 1156 socket 1366 Core i7 and their appropriate motherboards.

The 125W version of the Phenom II X6 1055T can hit around 3.8GHZ usually whereas the 95W version of the X6 1055T can hit around 4.0GHZ or thereabouts.

Regarding Cinebench it has been shown that R10 actually produces lower results than the latest R11 which has further optimisations for AMD processors.

CPU-NB overclocking is what is missing from allot of these X6 reviews - and this is where the Thubans really shine.

We've been through this on other forums MiniYazz.

Firstly - Hyperthreading uses spare cpu cycles to 'fool' the OS into thinking it has room for more threads (Thats the basic gist of how it works)- under real stress scenarios you can immediately see the flaw in this. Also in terms of overclocking the i7's get allot hotter with HT enabled - so one of the main advantages of the i7 core is defunct once you start overclocking @/to 4ghz and beyond.

MOST I7's I've seen clock to ~3.6Ghz, MOST 1090T's I've seen clock to ~4Ghz.

We've seen this in other forums in REAL testing (not hand picked chips reviewing sites usually get) and whilst synthetic benchmarks usually favour the Intel side (Also bear in mind the recent debacle called intel optimisation's in compiler coding!) in REAL case scenarios that's where we see the benefits of the X6's - Take for example Cinebench 11.5 - which has true AMD optimisations (just like Intel) and you'll see the true power of the X6.

You mention SiSandra tests - here you go - My £225 CPU v's Intel's £600 / £900 babies. I'd hardly call that a trouncing...
http://i1022.photobucket.com/albums/...sisoft4ghz.jpg

I'm trying to find the benchies of the 980x v's stock 1090T in BFBC2 I found online - bear with me and I'll post them up asap mate.

All in all I just think these X6's are underrated in allot of reviews- and when you come down to it - No £500+ extra is worth the premium for a 980x over a 1090T unless it was HUUUUUGE gains which it aint.

Not true that i7s clock to only around 3.6GHz but I agree with you for the rest of that.

I tend not to follow reviews but check forums for what users report back - hence why I claim 920's clock to around ~3.6 in the main, mate.
When i say clock to - I'm talking about 24/7 clocks - not suicide ones lol :) - Feel free to check my zoomee photobucket album for Prime95 24hour stability test lol

Heres the linkie for the BFBC2 1090T v's 980x thing I found btw:

http://www.guru3d.com/article/phenom...090t-review/18

"The game has native support for DirectX 11 and on processor testing side of things, parallelized processing supporting two to eight parallel threads, which is great if you have a quad core processor. "

But the article does go on later to show that CPU don't really mean squat compared to GPU for graphics - so my bad on that one ;)

Next page in that article is on 3dmark vantage : http://www.guru3d.com/article/phenom...090t-review/19 - Again, hardly a trouncing eh miniyazz? and I bet these guys didn't even try pushing the CPU-NB as far as it can go.....

your experience then fair enough but there are plenty of people on these forums who have i7 920s at 4ghz. Is your OC 24/7 then?

yes sir it is :) - and I hardly call myself a hardened overclocker tbh (more a noob if anything lol)

http://i1022.photobucket.com/albums/...NB142v_12v.jpg http://i1022.photobucket.com/albums/..._cinebench.jpg

Since them benchies / tests above, I've changed my setup to 2 x Akasa Apaches on the H50 since which my CPU-NB is begging for more lol - its upto 2600 rock solid stable at the moment
http://i1022.photobucket.com/albums/..._4ghz_2600.jpg

I could probably push further but like I said - its a 24/7 OC so I don't want to push too much (nor my luck either lol) - nor do I like too much noise from my PC hence keep all fans on low RPM's.

PS - All equipment is thanks to scan - I lurves u x

The 980 is a bit of a specialist chip - it's what Intel *could* pitch against the X6s if they had to, but they don't, because their 4 core chips seem to do a good enough job:

860 vs 1090T
http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/108?vs=146

940 vs 1090T
http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/46?vs=146

Or maybe we should be looking at the 950 as it's only 7 quid more than a 1090T now :p

The AMD manufacturing process is really coming good - their 45nm parts are clocking extremely well for the voltage. If they can transfer that to bulldozer and 32nm we're in for a treat, but on the current generation they *need* to clock higher to compete with nehalems.

The real value of the phenoms isn't the 1090T, which is priced too high and hits Intel competition, but it's the cheaper 6 cores - there is no Intel competition here, and they have the market to themselves as Intel put up only dual core opposition.

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Originally Posted by kalniel

The real value of the phenoms isn't the 1090T, which is priced too high and hits Intel competition, but it's the cheaper 6 cores - there is no Intel competition here, and they have the market to themselves as Intel put up only dual core opposition.

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2 right mate - I need to stop getting excited lol ;) Back when I bought my 1090T setup it worked out £100 cheaper than the equivalent 920 setup. Now the markets all over the place with additional chips - 1055T's are what would seem best buys at mo.

:rockon:

Bring on Bulldozer (even though I have to change mainboard if / when they're out :rant: )

As always though we are waiting on software catching up to make full use of existing technologies....but thats another story ;)

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Originally Posted by zoomee

Bring on Bulldozer (even though I have to change mainboard :rant: )

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At least you can use your 1090T in an AM3+ motherboard(hopefully).

Wow, lots of replies :p I don't have the time to reply to each so I'm just going to leave it with a few general points. Firstly, I quite agree that AMD have the price/performance crown. No doubt about it. And in that respect it's a bit silly to compare a £800 CPU with a £150 CPU.

Regarding i7 clocks, I suspect it's fair to say that x58 i7s clock significantly further than S1156 i7s (based on my own limited experience). I could be wrong on this - but from what I've picked up, if there's an X58 clocked below 4GHz it's because the cooling isn't up to the task, whereas (I think, and may be wrong) with the S1156 i7s it's more commonly that the CPU has reached its limits. Certainly my 920 happily clocked to 4.3GHz for stable 24/7 operation (folding) when I put it under water, and it was far from a golden chip in terms of voltage. With my H50 cooling it, I could only keep load temperatures under control at 4-4.1GHz, and that's by no means a bad CPU cooler, so it certainly wouldn't surprise me that many people haven't clocked their x58 i7s to 4GHz.

Also agreed that a clock for clock comparison between i7/Thuban isn't entirely fair for the reasons stated earlier. However, it's the best we can do and it makes more sense to compare CPUs using clock speeds (something which allows some constructive comparison between architectures) rather than whatever arbitrary clock speed either manufacturer has decided should be 'stock' speed.

Regarding the 3D mark Vantage score, zoomee - they're comparing the 1095T overclocked to 4.1GHz (though I take your point about NB o/cing) to the stock 980x (3.33GHz?) and the 980x remains faster (barely). If you were to compare them clock for clock (or at stock vs stock, or max o/c vs max o/c, whatever tickles your fancy :p) then based on that benchmark at least I'm sure there'd be a pretty significant (~20%) difference.
By the way, I can't read your SiSandra screenie, it's too small :(

Anyway, I'm about to make the switch from i7 to Phenom II X4, so I'm certainly not an Intel fanboy in case anyone was wondering :p