AMD Releases Three New Low-Cost CPUs

WesternActor writes "With its new Fusion APUs coming out in about a month, you wouldn't think AMD would still be tweaking its processor lineup. But it released three new processors today—the Phenom II X6 1100T Black Edition, the Phenom II X2 565 Black Edition, and the Athlon II X3 455—to balance out its price-performance offerings. The Black Edition CPUs with their unlocked multipliers are probably the most interesting, particularly the Phenom II X6 1100T Black Edition which has six cores, runs at 3.3 GHz, and costs only $265. As the name implies, the 1100T represents only a minute increase in clock speed over the 1090T. It even has the same amount of L2 and L3 cache (3MB and 6MB, respectively), is based on the same 45nm production process, and is designed for the currently standard AM3 socket. Given that 1090T got the downward nudge in price to $235, however, the 1100T offers slightly better performance for less money."

Comments

1090T

[cosm]

I have a 1090T in my main home/dev machine. It is excellent. Gaming, video encoding, whatever. Combined with a boot SSD and 6GB of DDR3, couldn't be happier with the system. Beats the hell out of a standard consumer box, and for the $300 I paid for the 1090, it spanks Intel's offerings (at least did at the time, probably still does). I will say though that consumer boxes are catching up pretty quickly, and their price/performance seems to have plummeted enough to compete with independent system builders (still don't get the feel good feeling).

If your building a new box with an X6, make sure the BIOS supports 'em. When I bought mine along with a new motherboard, I didn't check, turned out it only supported quads out of the box. I was in such a rush to see the CPU in action, I went to best-buy, bought a machine that had an X4, put the X4 in my new board so I could flash the board to support X6, and then swapped the CPUs back out. Desperate geek times call for desperate geek measures.

Note: I didn't return the X4 Best Buy machine, but was seriously tempted to :)

Re:1090T

[blair1q]

It spanked nothing. It may have been a nudge better in performance at the same price, or $3-5 less for the same performance, but Intel gets a little juice from its brand recognition and power and reliability numbers.

In those segments where Intel and AMD compete, Intel can make better ASPs than AMD, and manufactures the goods for cheaper per unit. That's why AMD is still dinky and Intel is a behemoth. In those segments where AMD and Intel don't compete head-to-head, you find Intel parts and no AMD parts. AMD has no niche to itself. That's another reason for the dinky/behemoth ratio.

P.S. Daps for flashing the BIOS just to get a board running under your chip. 3 out of 1000 /.ers would have even considered it, and 1.5 of those would have bricked their system doing it.

amd has better chipset choices and lower MB prices

[Joe The Dragon]

amd has better chipset choices and lower MB prices

Man, already?!

[John Pfeiffer]

Argh! They knocked down the price? I just bought a 1090T last month... Oh well, par for the course. The whole sequence of events was just FRAUGHT with BS. :(

The motherboard in my primary computer shit itself suddenly and for no apparent reason, and I had to RMA it. This took three weeks for some god-unknown reason considering they didn't 'repair' anything, but instead sent me a different board with a new s/n sticker on it with my serial.

I finally get the motherboard back only to DROP THE GODDAMN CPU DURING REINSTALLATION. So, when it DIDN'T WORK, I had reason to assume it was the chip. So I bought the 1090T, which I was going to do anyway come February. Since, amazingly, my 3-year old AM2+-based motherboard supports an AM3 hexacore with nothing more than a BIOS update...

Still nothing. Examining the board, I smelled burning semiconductors...and then burned my finger on a VREG... Yeah, I had WORDS with the tech support about my RMA, believe it.

Not having another three weeks to piss away, I got a cheap motherboard, and a couple sticks of RAM (Because it takes DDR3) and was back up and running with the 1090T.

The reason I'm saying all this, is so you have some appreciation for what I went through, to be rewarded with an absolute beauty of a machine with the 1090T at its core. And I'm not being sarcastic, for once. The CPU's a real monster. I have it overclocked to a perfectly stable 4.00GHz, with the STOCK COOLER.

Renders go fast as anything, and Photoshop CS5 x64 starts up in 2.5 seconds. (Unless I just added some new fonts.)

Right now, my only limitation is the 4GB of RAM, when my old machine had 8GB. I'll have to do something about that.

Some nimrods were calling me stupid for buying an AMD, but you look at the price of Intel's chips, and the hexacore offerings start at $900!!! What in all of fuckery?? My whole new mobo+CPU+RAM combo cost a THIRD that! Man, some people...