AMD Phenom II X6 1090T review roundup

So AMD’s new hexacore CPU range is official, it’s cheap (comparatively speaking), but is it any good? For that we turn to the bevy of launch-day reviews, and if you’re the sort of person who sneaks a look at the last page of a book because they simply have to know the outcome, here it is: for the money, the Phenom II X6 1090T processor is threatening to give Intel’s similarly priced chips something of a spanking. More after the cut.

Understandably, the people who’ll see the best return on the X6 will be those running apps that take advantage of the multiple cores: video editing pros, multimedia tinkerers and anything with threaded-processing support. Still, not everyone should immediately plump for the X6; at least one reviewer suggests that gamers would generally get a better return if they spent the money on a Phenom II X4 chip instead and put the leftovers toward an SSD or new video cards.

Compared to the Intel Core i7-980X, it’s understandably slower, but AMD’s chip is also straightforward to overclock and – while less intelligent than Intel Turbo Boost – the new Turbo CORE auto-overclock system squeezes out a welcome 400-500MHz extra.

For more details than you can probably stomach, there are plenty of reviews linked below. AMD are heavily pushing the value message with the new hexacores, promising that a full system based on the new CPU will come out cheaper than Intel’s own hexacore Core i7-980X on its own.