Introduction

First of all, I would like to thank Links for providing the hardware used for testing and AMD for providing the tested processor samples.

After reviewing the top of the line Phenom II X6 1090T, AMD sent us its smaller brother, Phenom II X6 1055T ticking at 2.80 GHz. Now, if you consider 1090T something of a pure breed racing horse, 1055T could be considered as pure breed working mule. With some clever competitive pricing, AMD is bringing six physical cores to the mainstream market, along with all of the improvements and technology upgrades Phenom II X6 1090T showed us a while back. Clocked to lower values for the same price tag, yes, but its main competitors Core i5 750 and Phenom II X4 965 should not take the new AMD's 1055T lightly.

Packaging and Contents

We received our test sample in tray package, but retail version packaging comes with AMD certified cooler, manual and three year warranty.

Phenom II X6 1055T

To save time and space, and not waste more words than necessary or to avoid copy/pasting of the last article, I would like to redirect you to the Phenom II X6 1090T article introduction. Because both AMD Phenom II X6 1090T and 1055T are based on exactly the same Thuban core, with same technology implementations, all the important architecture changes in the processor core design have already been discussed in our previous article, which you can read HERE.



The only difference between the flagship 1090T and mainstream 1055T models are their core clocks. Where Phenom II X6 1090T works at 3.20 GHz with optional TURBO CORE boost to 3.6 GHz, the slower and cheaper 1055T works at 2.80 GHz and has the same TURBO CORE boost option, ranging up to 3.3 GHz when just three or less cores are under load. We talked about TURBO CORE more in our last article, but I forgot to mention that you are not necessarily limited to just three core boost, which is set by default by AMD. In newer versions of AMD's Overdrive overclocking utility you can manually set the number of cores that will be boosted by TURBO CORE. There is a drawback here of course. Setting more cores to be boosted will result in a lower overclock by TURBO CORE, as the TDP limiter will be reached faster. Setting fewer cores to be boosted means you can gain more performance in single threaded applications, but could lose some in light/medium threaded applications.
Either way, the options are there, and is up to the user to additionally optimize CPU performance.



Power consumption for 1055T remains at acceptable 125W under full load, and it is expected to have, just like 1090T, very low heat output as well. So to be the proud owner of one of these affordable six core processors you would have to meet the following conditions:

• Mainstream AM2+/AM3 (DDR2 or DDR3) motherboard with BIOS update supporting Phenom II X6 1050T
• Mainstream PSU with at least 350 W of power (depends on the rest of your configuration)

And that's it. Not very demanding this six core power house, is it? Again and again AMD continues to surprise us with the flexibility and backward compatibility the new Phenom II processors. Hordes of users with older AM2+ and slower versions of Phenom I/II or Athlon I/II processors can just swap for new six core Phenoms and enjoy a great performance boost, better overclocking potential, and in some cases even lower power consumption and heat output.



As for pricing, AMD set the Phenom II X6 1055T at $199, and that's right next to Intel's Core i5 750, and its own Phenom II X4 965. Things wont be easy for 1055T, as Core i5 750 is one of the best value/performance processors from Intel, and on the other hand, many buyers could be easily mislead with Phenom II X6 965's magical 3.40 GHz speed, and opt for faster clock rather than more cores. Although TURBO CORE should effectively nullify all the advantages Phenom II X4 965 has in lesser threaded applications, users don't seem to be aware of this, and it might be AMD's fault for not emphasizing enough the new features of Phenom II X6 processors, specifically TURBO CORE.

So to clear that up with our readers, Phenom II X6 1055T does not have a fixed clock to 2.80 GHz. Depending on the work load it will vary from 3.30 GHz (single-dual threaded work load) to 2.80 GHz when under full load across all six cores. What this means is that Phenom II X6 1055T in theory should have minimal lag behind Phenom II X4 965 or 955 in light threaded applications, and show significantly better performance in multithreading optimized applications. So before choosing your processor, think well what kind of computing will you be doing with it. Does your work, or entertaining applications support multithreading? Will they add support in near future? Those are the only two important questions that you need to know, when in doubt between faster clocked X4 965 or "slower" X6 1055T.

For any other details about new Phenom II X6 processors, please read the second page of our Phenom II X6 1090T review by clicking HERE

Test Systems

Below you can see the entire list of programs used to test our processors. Most of the tests make good use of multithreading, but just like real-life situations, there are some tests that prefer higher clock frequencies over number of cores or size of L2/L3 cache buffer. Since Windows 7 64-bit is used from now on as base for processor benchmarks, some of benchmarks are used in 64-bit versions as well.