


Call it strange, but we ran and re-ran these tests. In fact, we formatted, started over, and got the same results. In Crysis, our Phenom II X6 1090T-based platform is simply slower than its quad-core predecessor—likely a result of its lower non-Turbo clock rate.
“But you’re clearly limited by your graphics card here,” you say. Alright, well, we’re using the 2010 reference system’s Radeon HD 5850, but let’s try something else. We’ll drop a Radeon HD 5870, a 5970, and a GeForce GTX 480 in the 1090T-based platform and see how much performance a faster card buys.

Amazing—the “fastest” card performs least-impressively, even at 1920x1080 and High quality settings. This is a combination we’d expect to hit the graphics fairly hard, but something is still screwy on the Phenom II X6 1090T-based platform. Now it looks less like our Radeon HD 5850 was holding back performance and more like the processor or platform is to blame.
Let’s try something else. Using a GeForce GTX 480, we’ll compare the performance of a stock Phenom II X6 1090T and a stock Core i7-930, then overclock the former to 3.7 GHz and the latter to 3.66 GHz (both processors with Turbo enabled). We’d expect to see headroom open up if there’s a bottleneck hampering performance.

Lo and behold, even with the fastest single-GPU card you can buy, the Phenom II X6 doesn’t spring to life. Meanwhile, the overclocked Core i7 leaps forward by quite a bit. This is eerily reminiscent of a gaming piece I wrote back in 2008 comparing high-end AMD and Intel gaming rigs. All else equal, the Phenom X4 I was testing at the time was simply creamed by Core i7 in Crysis.
This one gaming test opened up a ton of additional reformatting, reinstalling, and testing, just to make sure everything was reproducible. The conclusion we’re going to draw early on is that a six-core CPU running at a lower clock rate—Turbo CORE or not—is probably not the way to go for gamers. At any rate, onto Left 4 Dead 2.
- AMD Can Do Six Cores, Too
- Phenom II X6: A Family Of Two
- Making Sense Of Turbo CORE
- 8-Series Chipsets, Revealed
- Test Setup And Benchmarks
- Benchmark Results: Synthetics
- Benchmark Results: Media And Transcoding Apps
- Benchmark Results: Productivity
- Benchmark Results: Crysis
- Benchmark Results: Left 4 Dead 2
- Benchmark Results: Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 2
- Benchmark Results: DiRT 2
- Power Consumption
- Conclusion
I just cant remember tom's last review that had an nvidia card with an AMD processor.
In this case, it does not perform better than i7-920, even though the 920 is a 4 core cpu (and no, no one really runs it at 2.66, everyone pushes it at least to 3, since it takes nothing to get it to that speed, and it right away outperforms AMD's 6 core, and has a much better memory throughput).
I was able to hit 3.7 with Turbo CORE enabled fairly easily. It might go higher, but I'd argue this probably isn't as much of an overclocking chip as a 965 might be.
Actually it's under 300$, but still really affordable
Like playing games while having handbreak and antivirus running at the same time.
I can see why you would but do you realize the time this would take to do everyones favorite game? Not a reasonable thing to do...
I was talking about 1055T.