AMD Phenom II X6 1090T 6-Core Processor Review

Test System Configuration Notes: When configuring our test systems for this article, we first entered their respective system BIOSes and set each board to its "Optimized" or "High performance Defaults". We then saved the settings, re-entered the BIOS and set memory timings for either DDR3-1333 with 8,8,8,24 timings. The hard drives were then formatted, and Windows 7 Ultimate x64 was installed. When the Windows installation was complete, we updated the OS, and installed the drivers necessary for our components. Auto-Updating and Windows Defender were then disabled, finally, we installed all of our benchmarking software, performed a disk clean-up, defragged the hard drives, and ran all of the tests.

HotHardware's Test Systems  Intel and AMD - Head To Head

Preliminary Testing with SiSoft SANDRA 2010 SP1  Synthetic Benchmarks

We began our testing with SiSoftware's SANDRA 2009 SP4, the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. We ran four of the built-in subsystem tests that partially comprise the SANDRA 2009 SP4 suite with Intel's new Core i7-980X Extreme (CPU Arithmetic, Multimedia, Memory Bandwidth, and Cache and Memory).  All of the scores reported below were taken with the processor running at its default clock speeds of 3.2GHz with 4GB of DDR3-1333 RAM running in dual-channel mode on the MSI 890FX-GD70 motherboard.

The AMD Phenom II X6 1090T performed well in the various SiSoft SANDRA tests that we ran. In the processor arithmetic and multimedia benchmark, the CPU finished about in the middle of the pack, unable to overcome the higher-end Intel processors. In the memory bandwidth test, the AMD platform offered up over 12GB/s of peak bandwidth, and in the combined cache and memory test, the Phenom II X6 finished at the top of the charts.