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."
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
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
amd has better chipset choices and lower MB prices