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.