AMD Phenom II X6 1075T CPU Review – revisited

1. Introduction2. The AMD Phenom II X6 1075T CPU3. Testing Methodology and Overclocking4. 3DMark Vantage5. 3DMark 116. SiSoft Sandra 20117. Cinebench R108. Cinebench R11.59. Super Pi10. Media Encoding: Cyberlink MediaEspresso 611. Grand Theft Auto IV:EFLC12. Closing Thoughts13. View All Pages

It's been over a year since AMD launched their Phenom II X4 and X6 processor lines and they are certainly showing their age compared to Intel's Sandy Bridge platform.  But can they still compete with Intel's latest Sandy Bridge processors?

We recently reviewed their latest Phenom II X4 980 Black Edition processor which is likely to be the last in their Deneb range before their next-gen Bulldozer platform is released.  Unfortunately this was merely a clock-bumped version of their Phenom II X4 975 Black Edition processor and didn't compete with Sandy Bridge on performance or price.

Today we are going to look at the AMD Phenom II X6 1075T processor which has been on the market for quite a while now.  It comes in at a very similar price to the Phenom II X4 975 Black Edition but features two extra cores.  Despite not having an unlocked multiplier, it can easily be overclocked providing you have an adequate cooler so we look forward to seeing how it performs in our tests.

If you purchase the AMD Phenom II X6 1075T, it will arrive in a retail box like the one pictured above with a basic cooler.  We received the processor on it's own without any retail packaging.

The 1075T processor itself looks almost identical to every other model in the range as they all use the same heatspreader and pin arrangement.  It's six cores are clocked at 3.00 GHz which is achieved using a bus speed of 200 MHz and a multiplier of 15x.  The therefore fills in the gap between the 1055T and 1090T Black Edition CPUs.

It features 128kb of L1 cache per core, 512kb of L2 cache per core and 6mb of L3 cache.  It is manufactured using a 45nm process and supports up to DDR3-1333Mhz memory.

For our tests we combined the AMD Phenom II X6 1075T with our ASRock 890GX Extreme4 motherboard and 4GB (2x 2GB) of DDR3-1600MHz Corsair Dominator RAM.  We cooled the 1075T using a Coolit Vantage A.L.C.

Test System

CPU: AMD Phenom II X6 1075T
Motherboard: ASRock 890GX Extreme4
Memory: 4GB (2x 2GB) Corsair Dominator DDR3-1600MHz
PSU: Corsair HX850W
Chassis: NZXT H2
Graphics Card: AMD Radeon 6950 (modded to 6970)
Cooler: Coolit Vantage A.L.C.
Thermal Paste: Arctic Cooling MX-3
Hard Drive: Kingston SSDNow V+ 128GB

Windows 7 Home Premium 64 Bit
3DMark Vantage
3DMark 11
PCMark Vantage
Super Pi Mod 1.5
Cyberlink MediaEspresso 7
FRAPS Professional
SiSoftware Sandra 2011
Cinebench R10
Cinebench R11.5
KitGuru Photoshop Benchmark 1(4)
Grand Theft Auto 4: EFLC

All the latest BIOS updates and WHQL drivers are used during testing. We perform under real world conditions, meaning KitGuru test all games across five closely matched runs and average out the results to get an accurate median figure.

We decided to use the automatic 30% overclocking feature which is built into the BIOS of the ASRock 890GX Extreme4 as it provides a significant overclock at the touch of a button.  This makes the 1075T and ASRock 890GX Extreme4 a great pair for users who don't have the know-how to overclock the CPU themselves but who still want to utilise the performance benefits of overclocking.

Futuremark released 3DMark Vantage, on April 28, 2008. It is a benchmark based upon DirectX 10, and therefore will only run under Windows Vista (Service Pack 1 is stated as a requirement) and Windows 7.  This is the first edition where the feature-restricted, free of charge version could not be used any number of times. 1280×1024 resolution was used with performance settings.

We achieved good scores in this test with the 1075T, including a healthy improvement when it was overclocked.

3DMark 11 is designed for testing DirectX 11 hardware running on Windows 7 and Windows Vista. The benchmark includes six all new benchmark tests that make extensive use of all the new features in DirectX 11 including tessellation, compute shaders and multi-threading.

After running the tests 3DMark gives your system a score with larger numbers indicating better performance. Trusted by gamers worldwide to give accurate and unbiased results, 3DMark 11 is the best way to test DirectX 11 under game-like loads.

If you want to learn more about this benchmark, or to buy it yourself, head over to this page.

We managed to achieve much better scores with the overclocked system in this test.

SiSoftware Sandra (the System ANalyser, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) is an information & diagnostic utility. It should provide most of the information (including undocumented) you need to know about your hardware, software and other devices whether hardware or software.  Sandra is a (girl) name of Greek origin that means “defender”, “helper of mankind”. We think that’s quite fitting.

It works along the lines of other Windows utilities, however it tries to go beyond them and show you more of what’s really going on. Giving the user the ability to draw comparisons at both a high and low-level. You can get information about the CPU, chipset, video adapter, ports, printers, sound card, memory, network, Windows internals, AGP, PCI, PCI-X, PCIe (PCI Express), database, USB, USB2, 1394/Firewire, etc.

Native ports for all major operating systems are available:

•       Windows XP, 2003/R2, Vista, 7, 2008/R2 (x86)

•       Windows XP, 2003/R2, Vista, 7, 2008/R2 (x64)

•       Windows 2003/R2, 2008/R2* (IA64)

•       Windows Mobile 5.x (ARM CE 5.01)

•       Windows Mobile 6.x (ARM CE 5.02)

All major technologies are supported and taken advantage of:

•       SMP – Multi-Processor

•       MC – Multi-Core

•       SMT/HT – Hyper-Threading

•       MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSSE3, SSE 4.1, SSE 4.2, AVX, FMA – Multi-Media instructions

•       GPGPU, DirectX, OpenGL – Graphics

•       NUMA – Non-Uniform Memory Access

•       AMD64/EM64T/x64 – 64-bit extensions to x86

•       IA64 – Intel* Itanium 64-bit

In SiSandra we noticed large increases in every test, showing how even a moderate overclock can help performance.

In SiSoft Sandra there were large improvements in every test when the system was overclocked.

Cinebench R10 has since been replaced by V11.5, but many people have a better indication of relative performance by the results from R10 – after all it has been around for years. We will however include R11.5 results on the following page. For those who don’t know Cinebench is not just a mere synthetic benchmarking application, it is based on the rendering engine from Cinema 4D.

The CPU test renders a 3D scene photo-realistically while applying performance intensive functions such as area light sources, procedural shaders, Ambient Occlusion and multi level reflections. Especially when used on faster, multi core CPU systems, MAXON CINEBENCH R10 delivers much more accurate results.

In this test we see huge gains in performance both from overclocking and from utilising all six cores rather than just one.

CINEBENCH is a real-world cross platform test suite that evaluates your computer’s performance capabilities. CINEBENCH is based on MAXON’s award-winning animation software CINEMA 4D, which is used extensively by studios and production houses worldwide for 3D content creation. MAXON software has been used in blockbuster movies such as Spider-Man, Star Wars, The Chronicles of Narnia and many more.

CINEBENCH is the perfect tool to compare CPU and graphics performance across various systems and platforms (Windows and Mac OS X). And best of all: It’s completely free.

We can see how the six cores of the 1075T make a huge difference in multi-threaded applications.

Super Pi is used by a huge audience, particularly to check stability when overclocking processors. If a system is able to calculate PI to the 32 millionth place after the decimal without mistake, it is considered to be stable in regards to RAM and CPU.

We didn't see a very big improvement in this test but the time taken to calculate Pi was reduced by a little by overclocking the system.

CyberLink MediaEspresso 6 is the successor to CyberLink MediaShow Espresso 5.5. With its further optimized CPU/GPU-acceleration, MediaEspresso is an even faster way to convert not only your video but also your music and image files between a wide range of popular formats.

Now you can easily playback and display your favorite movies, songs and photos not just on your on your mobile phone, iPad, PSP, Xbox, or Youtube and Facebook channels but also on the newly launched iPhone 4. Compile, convert and enjoy images and songs on any of your computing devices and enhance your videos with CyberLink’s built-in TrueTheater Technology.

New and Improved Features

• Ultra Fast Media Conversion – With support from the Intel Core i-Series processor family, ATI Stream & NVIDIA CUDA, MediaEspresso’s Batch-Conversion function enables multiple files to be transcoded simultaneously.
• Smart Detect Technology – MediaEspresso 6 automatically detects the type of portable device connected to the PC and selects the best multimedia profile to begin the conversion without the need for user’s intervention.
• Direct Sync to Portable Devices – Video, audio and image files can be transferred in a few easy steps to mobile phones including those from Acer, BlackBerry, HTC, Samsung, LG, Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, and Palm, as well as Sony Walkman and PSP devices.
• Enhanced Video Quality – CyberLink TrueTheater Denoise and Lighting enables the enhancement of video quality through optical noise filters and automatic brightness adjustment.
• Video, Music and Image File Conversion – Convert not only videos to popular formats such as AVI, MPEG, MKV, H.264/AVC, and FLV at the click of a button, but also images such as JPEG and PNG and music files like WMA, MP3 and M4A.
• Online Sharing – Conversion to video formats used by popular social networking websites and a direct upload feature means posting videos to Facebook and YouTube has never been easier.

For our testing today we are converting a 1080P AVI file to Apple Mp4 format for playback on a portable device. We will also be converting a 15 track album from MP3 to M4A format. These are common procedures for many people and will give a good indication of system power.

In our media encoding test, the time taken to encode the video was reduced by around 50 seconds by overclocking.

Grand Theft Auto: Episodes From Liberty City is a standalone compilation of the DLC episodes for Grand Theft Auto IV, containing both The Lost and Damned and The Ballad of Gay Tony on one disc. It was released alongside the DLC release of The Ballad of Gay Tony on 29 October 2009 for the Xbox 360 and released on 13 April 2010 for Microsoft Windows and Playstation 3. It does not require a copy of Grand Theft Auto IV to play, nor is an Xbox Live or PSN account necessary (except for multiplayer).

The engine is still extremely demanding for this game – even months later for the newest hardware. The latest version changes some of the rendering calls and is used partially within the latest Max Payne engine.  We tested the game at 1080p using high settings.

Overclocking our system boosted the average frame rate quite considerably and made a noticeable difference in game.

AMD is facing fierce competition from Intel at the moment – Sandy Bridge offers such fantastic performance for a reasonable price. To be fair, AMD might be architecturally behind, but they are offering 6 physical cores at good price points.  In Cinebench R11.5 we saw just what a difference those extra two cores can make in multi-threaded applications.

Additionally, The ASRock 890GX Extreme4 motherboard will make a great partner for any AMD processor as it is very well featured and has an extremely simple 30% overclock function that boosts performance significantly with no effort or skill required.  This is perfect for less savvy users who would be uncomfortable overclocking their system manually.

The question remains, would we recommend buying the AMD Phenom II X6 1075T? Even though it performed well in our tests, we can't see why anyone would buy this processor due to the way it's priced.  It can be yours for £141 at Scan or £139.99 at OCUK which is extremely close to the price of the Intel i5-2500K processor which will beat it in most benchmarks.

Not only that, but Overclockers in the UK are selling it for the same price as the 1090T and for only £4 less than the 1100T flagship model. The same pricing problems are mirrored with many UK retailers. We really just can't get a grip of the AMD pricing right now. It is simply bonkers.

For the same price our money has to go with the 1090T as our samples have shown slightly better headroom with overclocking… not to mention there is also the added benefit of an unlocked multiplier to make life as simple as possible. Unless the price of the 1075T drops to around £110 it is rather difficult to recommend.

Pros

• Six Cores
• Runs cool

Cons

• Pricing is crazy
• Locked Multiplier

KitGuru says: If you're in the market for a hex-core AMD processor, buy the 1090T or 1100T – Black Editions rock.

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