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Phenom II X6 released AMD has recently changed its strategy. They now aim at proving Value for money instead of pure performance. The AMD Phenom II was a really great product, it could easily keep pace with the Core 2s and was much cheaper than the i7s at the time of launch.
With the introduction of the i5s and i3s, Intel had really made it hard for AMD to price their products, their Top dog processor was going for just $185, while Intel sold its top of the like 980X for $1200. There was a huge hole and a massive void between the two in terms of price and performance.
IN COMES THE 6 HEADED BEAST !!!
Phenom II X6 die shot
Just to bring some competition back to Intel, AMD released what I believe is one of the most value for money processors in the market, the AMD Phenom II X6 series.
They have currently released 2 Models:
AMD Phenom II X6 1090T : Its a 3.2GHz Hexa core processor, begging to be overclocked ! Its got an unlocked multiplier and a TDP of 125W, so its not really at its thermal borderline too (140W).
The chip runs surprisingly cool, which makes it even better for overclocking. You can easily reach clocks of beyond 4GHz even with a half decent Air cooler (my friend could do 4.4GHz on Stock cooler !)
The chip has a really revolutionary feature thats sets it apart from the older Phenom II chips. Its called "Turbo Core". Its basically automatic overclocking, it increases the core speed of the processor to 3.6GHz when the "extra" cores are not active. So, if the software uses only 3 cores, the processor with shut down the extra cores and overclock the other 3 to 3.6GHz.
Another feature is the great power management features. It has hardware based power management which makes then incredibly efficient.The 980X at full load eats up 272W, where as the 1090T consumes only 187W.
The other model is the 1055T : Clocked at 2.8Ghz, this is a really great value for money processor. At just $199, AMD is giving you a 2.8GHz processor with 9MB of cache. The Turbo mode will take the clocks up to 3.2GHz. This is the chip that I hope is a great success with the market, at just $33/core,I see this as a huge threat to the Core i5s.
These processors really shine in heavily multi threaded applications and can fight the i7 920/940 and even surpass it in a few occasions. The AMD platform seems to be much more future proof, specially with the announcement that Intels newer chips will not work on the X58.
As far as gaming is concerned, most of the benchmarks are neck-to-neck, the i7s do pull away at low resolutions, but who games at low resolutions anyway, but then with the money you save, you can might as well get a better GPU or PSU.
Its nice to see, AMD with all their debts are coming out with a good product like this, Its not the fastest in the market, by no stretch, the 980X still rules the roost, but an awesome product never the less !
These processors are available in indian stores now at a price of Rs10,000 for the 1055T and Rs15,000 for the 1090T.
Here are links to reviews:
Guru3D
OCC
TweakTown
Legit Reviews
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Originally Posted by bonda 
