Final Words & Conclusion

Final Words & Conclusion

The conclusion on AMD's six-core processors tend to get a little repetitive, but yeah... they surely do offer a lot of value for money. Despite being a minor speed bump over the 1090T for the money you really can't go wrong here. And if you are an overclocker, well... it clocks as good as the rest of the bunch, which does bring in a curiosity... other six-core BE processors will overclock roughly as fast as this one, so why spend more money on the most expensive model? The answer there is twofold, the latest processor stepping often have a little more reserve when it comes to tweakability and then there's the sheer fact that these processors made the most stable yield and got sorted as most high-end.

The other side of the scope is also a little confusing, if you can life with a 3.0 GHz six core AMD processor, opposed to the 3.3 GHz version we just tested (and we doubt you'd notice the real-world difference really) then you can find the Phenom II X6 1055T for as low as $179.00 already, an utter and complete bargain. That's quite a difference compared to the 265 USD for this 3.3 GHz BE version. All in all choices you need to make and look in to.

Regardless of that, the Phenom II X6 1100T is a truly lovely processor of course, which in fact is targeting Intel's Coere i7 950 processor. If you are the kind of guy that that likes a spicy PC, plays the occasional game, yet has a strong focus on compute performance, content creation and multi-media transcoding etc. then nothing available in the market to date can do what the X6 processors manage for this kind of money. The Phenom II X6 processor series just loves to create, edit, render, encode / decode applications on your PC and oozes with value with the six embedded CPU cores. 

The downside however will always be the fact that many software applications mostly support 2 to 4 way threading. For example, there's barely a game on this planet that supports six cores, much like most Windows applications. But the apps that do support it haul ass in performance as instantly your system gets into 6th gear. In the long term though, this might be a wise investment, as over time more and more apps will get broad multi-core / multi-thread support. And that's where you'll reap the benefits.

Tagged at an MSRP of 270 EUR/USD (thus cheaper in stores) this processor is what it is, value whilst offering an excellent overall PC experience. And sure, core for core, this processor is without doubt slower than Intel's competitive offering, but remember this, if you take the cheapest Intel six-core Core i7 970 3.2 GHz processor you pay 899 USD, with the 980X costing a full G. Even if the 1100T is a third to half slower than that processor, it's still nearly four times cheaper and unless you continuously render, compute or transcode... the performance difference remains trivial to spot. It's a great deal for a lot of compute power.

As always AMD is doing exactly what it's good at, offering value products. We do feel changes in peak performance are needed though, Intel is warming up the oven and readies their buns called Sandy Bridge processors, they will arrive in January of 2011 already. Next to that we we are very interested to see AMD's next generation APU processors with embedded GPU. But the honest truth remains that most people are not interested in the embedded GPU, they want faster per core performance.

Anyway, you can't beat the value of the processor tested today compared to Intel's six-core offering. The 1100T is mighty fine processor to have inside any modern PC, it is really fast. But keep it in mind, if you do not plan to overclock then the 1055T is already selling at 179 USD, that's a crazy 30 bucks per core and let me assure you, that is a heap of value.

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