AMD Phenom II X6 1100T review

With Intel poised to unleash its latest range of processors, AMD has expanded its top-end range of six-core chips with this new chip. The Phenom II X6 1100T sounds impressive, but the naming indicates it’s only a small step up from the existing 1090T. The only difference between the two processors being a measly 100MHz increase.

It may not be a huge hike, but it’s still of interest, as to date this is only the sixth six-core processor to be made available for desktop PCs. The others are the aforementioned 1090T, its slower siblings the 1055T and 1075T, plus Intel’s monstrously powerful Core i7-970 and 980X.

It’s telling by their scarcity that the desktop PC market hasn’t really taken to these multi-core designs. So much parallel processing power is only of any use for certain tasks, such as media encoding. In our video encoding test, we found that the 1100T wasn’t massively faster than its predecessor, gaining four points to reach 143. More importantly it’s outpaced by Intel’s similarly priced Core i7-860 at 164 points, despite that only being a quad-core design.

The 1100T uses Turbo-Core technology, which allows up to three cores to reach an impressive 3.7GHz. This occurred during our single-threaded image editing test, something we failed to get working when testing the original chips, probably a problem with the initial BIOS support. A score of 126 is certainly impressive; that said, Turbo-Core still lacks flexibility compared to Intel’s Turbo Boost, being unable to balance the boost across any number of cores, a fact borne out by the i7-860’s score of 148 in this test.

If you’ve got a compatible AMD motherboard and want the maximum amount of parallel processing power, without a full system rebuild, then the 1100T is the processor for you. A more sensible upgrade can be had for just £129 though, in the form of the 1055T, which scores 124 in our video encoding test. If you’re happy to build a new PC from scratch, then the Core i7-860 is a better choice, though in that case we’d recommend waiting to see what Intel announce early next year.