Phenom II X6 1090T CPU Review

Conclusions

The new Phenom II X6 1090T isn’t faster than Core i7 CPUs from Intel. In fact, it doesn’t compete with Core i7, as we are talking about a complete different price range. Therefore on the very high-end CPU market Intel is still the only game in town.

However, the main advantage of Phenom II X6 1090T is its price, which puts it to compete against Core i5 CPUs.

The only Core i5 CPU we had available was Core i5-750, which is 33% cheaper than Phenom II X6 1090T. For this huge price difference, we were expecting Phenom II X6 1090T to destroy Core i5-750, which was not the case. In fact, in several applications the quad-core Core i5-750 was faster than the six-core Phenom II X6 1090T (PCMark overall score, PCMark gaming score, PCMark music score, VirtualDub, WinRAR and some games). They tied in some applications (some games and After Effects CS4) and the new CPU from AMD was faster in others (PCMark TV and Movies score, PCMark communications score, PCMark productivity score and Photoshop CS4). When Phenom II X6 1090T was faster, it was by only a small margin (5% to 10%), not justifying the extra price.

There is one important exception, though: Cinebench. On this 3D rendering program Phenom II X6 1090T simply crushed Core i5-750, being 74% faster than this CPU from Intel. So this new CPU may be an outstanding CPU for professionals building a computer for 3D modeling and rendering that don’t want to buy an expensive Core i7-based system. For the average user, however, we find it hard to recommend this new processor.