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Worth upgrading from X4 to X6 ?

Gripen90

Gripen90

Gripen90

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Haarby, DENMARK
I'm a hardware buff and I know it but I can't make up my mind whether it's "sane" to upgrade from my now 1-year-old Phenom II X4 955 B.E to the Phenom II X6 1090T ? I have seen lots and lots aof reviews but I can't make an exact overview if I'll have any benefit or not.

The reason is, I primarily watch some DVD movies and do a lot of Photoshop CS4 and InDesign CS4 on my PC and then of course I game a lot, and when I do it it's at 1920x1200 with 8x/16xFSAA/16xAF.

I'm a retired overclocker - I don't OC my hardware anymore. I just want a solid and good performance base. I simply can't get myself to do 24hours of Prime95 testing just to find it crashes in FSX with view distance set to max.
I just want to turn on the PC and get working/gaming

I've read the Thuban Quad-cores should be coming and perhaps they're a better choice for me ?

I'd highly appreciate personal opinions and also own experience regarding the topic.
 
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I'm not sure how much better the quad core thubans will be, considering that the phenom II x6's are only around the i5 750 to i7 920's performance.

The 4 core thubans surely can't be much faster than the current phenom II x4's, though we will have to wait and see!

Finally the price is quite a lot, especially the 1090T. For almost £110 more (almost double) you will not be seeing enough gains to warrant the upgrade. In games you won't see much (if any) changes either. So I would stick to what you got and wait and see what happens.
 
I agree with teddy. For games in general (any games that are not optimised to use multi-cores effectively), the 1090T would deliver lower frame rate than 955/965BE.
And for Crysis in particular, for some unknown reason the 1090T bottleneck graphic card big time, even when the 1090T is overclocked:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-phenom-ii-x6-1090t-890fx,2613-9.html

I would say wait for the new architecture CPU coming next year to see how they perform before deciding to upgrade or not. You 955BE would be fine for now.
 
Hi

having got my 1090T yesterday and tinkering with it for 24 hours I think I can give my current opinion.

Like you I always like best speed working out the box rather than clocking .. never really done it before and never learnt how ... but have got an OcUK bundle i7 920 @3.2Ghz (original version) which was obviously easy to do with the instructions printed out :D

My AMD rig has had a 965 in it up til yesterday which i manually used AMD Overdrive to clock to 3.8Ghz when encoding x264 but ran @ stock all other times so Im pretty much a noob to clocking.

So far ... the X6 feels the same @ stock to the 965 in windows .. not tried gaming yet but I will fire up FSX later and let you know how that feels compared but havent currently got it or any add-ons installed :eek:

Currently even if you have retired from clocking I would say the 1090 is only a resonable upgrade if you use heavy threaded apps that are not Intel optimised or you wish a modest easy peasy overclock ... gaming will see no benefit over a 955 unless FSX suddenly magically uses all 6 cores unless the Turbo Core thing really kicks in which I have yet to experience...

will post back later after a couple hours priming @ 4Ghz
 
I wouldn't bother with this upgrade unless you encode a lot (I'm talkin 5 hi res movies a day) or run virtual machines, jus keep the quad
 
It really depends if your applications are capable of using multiple threads to spread the load between cores.

I went 4 cores because i do run several VMs on this box, but even when im gaming and running a few apps and have the VMs still running in the background, i still think 95% of the time the 4th core might as well be off. Unless im working on those VMs they arent actively doing an lot anyway
 
Thank you very much all for sharing your views on this matter. Sofar it looks like I'll just sit back and enjoy the old 955'er for at least a few more months unless something changes :)
 
I already thought about x6 but I decided to keep my X4 965BE to save some money for the new AMD Fusion due by 2010 so between X4 to X6 are no big difference apart with 2 extra core and Turbo Core so rest of it are same -X4 965BE is 125w same as 1090T so I would suggest to keep using the quad core until the new 8 core in the 2011 with 32nm...
 
braveheart said:
I already thought about x6 but I decided to keep my X4 965BE to save some money for the new AMD Fusion due by 2010 so between X4 to X6 are no big difference apart with 2 extra core and Turbo Core so rest of it are same -X4 965BE is 125w same as 1090T so I would suggest to keep using the quad core until the new 8 core in the 2011 with 32nm...
Click to expand...

Agreed. I am thinking the same. Stick with quad until bulldozer comes out and then go for the mega upgrade. Fingers crossed that it will drop into my current mobo. Looks for certain that the fusion ones wont but I imagine they will release non fusion versions?

Will probably need a PSU upgrade as well
 
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Just for trying out purposes, a friend of mine will borrow me his 1090T untill his hardware, case, psu etc arrives, then we ca do a small amount of testing and see how it behaves in an older DDR2 environment :)
 
Gripen90 said:
Just for trying out purposes, a friend of mine will borrow me his 1090T untill his hardware, case, psu etc arrives, then we ca do a small amount of testing and see how it behaves in an older DDR2 environment :)
Click to expand...

Looking forward to seeing the results :)
 
Having bought a 1090T, going from a 965BE. I would have to say that unless you are doing a lot of video encoding then its not worth the bother.
The cores do scale with fps very well. I can now do 9.1~10.2fps encoding, compared with 6.3~7fps before.
Gaming is a bit of a non issue, as they have no perceivable between the two processors I have.
 
Okay I got the Phenom II X6 1090T running and lets say that in terms of gaming performance the CPU is somewhat of a downgrade compared to the Phenom II X4 955 I had running before.
All my benchmark programs saw a performance decrease.

In Vantage the GPU score dropped 20'371 to 19'360, despite that the CPU score vent up from 42241 to 47410 (PhysX enabled).

3Dmark03 dropped from 84'989 to 81'783

Call Of Juarez DX10 dropped from 117.3 FPS to 113.6 FPS

Heaven 1.0 dropped from 53,8 FPS to 52,5 FPS

The only benchmark that went up in score was 3Dmark06 from 17'628 to 18'239
955 CPU Score 4465
1090T CPU Score 5534

As for games Crysis shows the same FPS but H.A.W.X actually saw an improvement from 108FPS to 113FPS.

All in all - certainly the 1090T is NOT worth it's money when it comes to gaming. An X4 will also do 90% of the video decoding with ease, so really just pass on the X6 it may sound like an "upgrade" but really it's not.

Also I don't know if the Turbo Core is working or not. Even with the newest BIOS for my board I couldn't find any option in the BIOS, and also having Core-temp running to check the CPU MHZ and load running an instance og SuperPI didn't show any "boost" all running 3.2GHz.
 
probably best to wait till AMD do 32nm. i think its quite some feat they managed to pop two extra cores in, at the same speed, on the same process and with the same TDP as the 955. 32nm should see some serious benefits.

that and the new architecture (hopefully bulldozer wont be another barcelona...).
 
Well I just had my PC turned of for dinner and went back and booted up and wanted to continue benchmarking and the suddenly I got all the results I had with the 955 running in the PC - both vantage, 3dmark, Coj etc gave me the same benchmark results ! Weird I thought, then I rebooted the PC and then I was back to the same lower results as before.
Turbo Core does work because I had Core Temp opened and had SuperPi running and a couple of times I saw one core speed up to 3599Mhz while normally most cores would run at 3199Mhz while some would go down to 800mhz when not used.

I think it's AMD's Turbo Core that's messing around with the syntethic benchmark results because in the games like Crysis and H.A.W.X which I also tested in there were no differences.

Its kinda annoying that Turbo Core isn't consistant but constantly changes in Mhz depending on whether 3 or more cores are used, if just the 4th is used a percentage the Turbo Core cuts back.
 
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I would say you are better off with the 955. As you are seeing, stock vs stock performance the 955 comes out ahead.

If you were an overclocker there would be more of an argument for the upgrade as there are architectural improvements on Thuban like the IMC able to run higher memory clocks....and the 4GHz AMD wall has finally been cracked.
 
You should really get it cranked up. Mine does 3.6GHz on stock 1.3V, 3.7GHz on 1.325V, and 3.8GHz on 1.35V.

So it's pretty damn easy to get 6 cores running @ 3.8GHz with very minimal extra voltage or heat.

You can also disable TurboCore by using the AMD-Overdrive software (which is actually really good).
 
You know you can't resist overclocking it :p

But seriously....free performance with minimal effort.
 
Yea I know I'd probably be better of overclocking it, but I like to have C&Q enabled so it throttles down when there no work load. Sofar I know C&Q doesn't work if you overclock via multiplier ?.

Also does the AMD Overdrive software work with nVidia chipsets ?

Also why did AMD even bother with Turbo Core since it's rarely makes any improvement at all, and when it's dynamic and not constant you can't really do any solid benchmarking either... they should have made it like Intel Turbo Boost which at least stays at the speed.
 
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