Final thoughts and rating
The introduction of seven new chips provides AMD with greater coverage at practically every price point below £200. In particular, the arrival of the Phenom II X6 1075T and Phenom II X4 970 BE nicely fills the £150-£200 bracket. This is important because Intel's current performance chips - Core i7, both sockets - retail north of £200 and we doubt the semiconductor giant will be moved enough to reduce pricing to match AMD's.AMD isn't bringing any new technology to the table with the high-end chips, however, as both CPUs are based on existing silicon revisions from the quad- and hexa-core families. Rather, the approach here is to put pressure on the pricing of Intel's enthusiast-orientated CPUs, we believe.
Phenom II X6 1075T slots right in-between the faster 1090T (£205) and slower 1055T (£155), making it an ideal fit in AMD's six-core processor line-up. Pricing, at £189, is too close to the multiplier-unlocked 1090T's for our liking, making it difficult to recommend until retailers drop the 1075T to, say, £175.
Our benchmarks show that the fastest quad-core chip that AMD has ever produced, Phenom II X4 970 BE, makes a little sense if your usual workloads aren't massively parallel, insofar as they can't take great advantage of more than four cores. Priced £10 below the Phenom II X6 1055T, its natural inter-family competitor, we find it a hard sell due to Turbo Core goodness in the six-core chips, which practically covers the frequency shortfall against quad-core CPUs when running apps on three, or fewer, cores. Unfortunately for the 970 BE it's difficult to look past the excellent 95W 1055T, if you can find one.
The optimist in us would have liked AMD to introduce a glut of high-performance, low-power chips before it transitions to a new microarchitecture. As it is, the X6 1075T and X4 970 BE serve to solidify AMD's position as price-to-performance leader in the sub-£200 processor market, and it's only the relative excellence of the surrounding Phenom chips that inhibits us from giving out recommendations.
The Good
Both high-end chips augment AMD's performance/value proposition
AMD provides a 500MHz Turbo Core boost on X6 1075T
The Bad
Simply fillers and speed-bumps
Quad-core chips' lack of Turbo Core is telling
HEXUS Rating
HEXUS Where2Buy
The AMD Phenom II X4 970 BE is currently available from SCAN.co.uk*.
The AMD Phenom II X5 1075T is currently available from SCAN.co.uk*.
HEXUS Right2Reply
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