AMD Phenom II X6 1100T Black Edition Review – overclocking performance

Rating: 9.0.

Today AMD release their new Phenom II X6 1100T Black Edition processor, the successor to the ever popular 1090T Black Edition. As the 1100T doesn't look that exciting on paper (with a 100mhz clock increase), we felt we would approach this review from a slightly different angle – taking our readers on a ‘step by step' guide to see how far we could push the chip with some hardcore air cooling.

The AMD Phenom II X6 processors have been a favourite with the ‘value aware' performance enthusiast audience … people who love the idea of having six physical cores, but are unwilling to pay Intel £700 for the pleasure. There is no doubting that Intel's Core i7 970 and Core i7 980X are the performance leaders, but at £705 and £730 inc vat respectively they can seriously sap your bank balance.

When you compare this against the wallet friendly X6 1100T's £225 inc vat asking price you can begin to understand the appeal of the unlocked AMD processors.

A large portion of the audience reading this today will be focusing on the overclocking capabilities of the new chip and many may also be moving up from a 1055T, the cheaper AMD ‘locked' alternative. We aim to cover as many overclocking performance bases today as possible, and hopefully by the end of the article you will be better educated as to what you can expect from AMD's latest and greatest, if you spend a little extra money on system cooling.

The AMD Phenom II X6 1100T Black Edition is AMD's new flagship processor, available at launch for $265 in the states and £225 inc vat in the UK. The 1090T will move down to a very modest $235/£200 price point to make way for the new model.

The 1110T is a socket AM3 processor clocked at 3.3ghz (3.7ghz via Turbo) and is manufactured using a 45nm process. It has a total of 9MB of cache, which breaks down into 6MB of shared L3 Cache and 3MB of L2 cache, 512kb per core. Memory support is unchanged, with DDR2 up to 1066mhz and DDR3 up to 1333mhz being offered. Obviously you can run faster than this via the motherboard bios, but these are the conservative ‘official' specifications direct from AMD.

These official specifications deliver up to 17.1 GB/s memory bandwidth with DDR2-1066mhz and 21.3 GB/s memory bandwidth with DDR3-1333mhz.

The processor runs via the Hypertransport 3.0 bus at up to 4,000 MT/s full duplex (2.0ghz x2). This particular processor is rated to a maximum TDP of 125 watts and a maximum temperature threshold of 62c. The AMD official rating for the voltage is set between 1.125 v and 1.40 volts – although we will delve into this more later.

As before, while the processor is rated to 3.3ghz, under Turbo it can achieve 3.7ghz. This means that when the processor isn't needing the full power of all six cores, it can shut down half the cores and increase the clock speed to a maximum of 3.7ghz. Most overclockers disable this feature then force all cores to achieve higher speeds anyway, and this is exactly what we will be doing later.

The physical appearance of the 1100T is just like any other Phenom II processor we have looked at.

The review today focuses on the overclocking capability of the AMD Phenom II X6 1110T Black Edition and we will explain our settings as we continually push the 1100T to its limitations.

There is much debate online as to ‘how to overclock the 6 core AMD processor' and while these processors can require a little hand holding at times, the basic methodology is straightforward. I actually find them extremely simple to overclock and they like voltage, as long as you don't get out of control.

Voltage limitations are also a constant topic of conversation and if you google online, you will see many overclocking forums have pages and pages of argument and counter argument as to how far you should really push the silicon.

My own findings may of course vary from other enthusiast users but I can honestly say that I have yet to kill any modern day processor by pushing it too hard. Perhaps I have ‘the luck of the Irish' when overclocking.

So let me state it clearly for anyone reading this. With air cooling, regardless of how hardcore it is, never force more than 1.575 volts through an AMD Phenom II X6 processor. If your cooling is modest, then aim much, much lower. The only air cooler I would use for this level of voltage is the Noctua NH D14. More on this cooler on the next page … but that is my own rule of thumb condensed into a paragraph.

Today we are going to review the processor with a multitude of settings and for each section I will detail the bios settings I used. This, in theory should mean that a quick perusal of settings should be easy for our readers, rather than scrolling down a single page with 5 or 6 sets of detailed bios configurations.

While many reviews will build up to an ‘overclocking' page near the end of the review, as I said earlier, the point of this article is to publish an analysis of the 1100T in various configurations of overclocked states.

So how far did we manage to push the 1100T?

I managed to get it to just over 4.4ghz at 1.6 volts, however from my own experience with AMD processors this could be rather fatal long term and while it would look great on paper, I wouldn't recommend our readers attempt this. Sure. if you are trying to break records with LN2, go for it, but for 24/7 real world use at the heart of an enthusiast system, forget it.

AMD rate the maximum voltage for these processors as 1.4 volts, but this is a very safe rating to ensure that failure rate is not an issue from them. As with all overclocking ventures, I don't want to be held responsible for any fried hardware. I recommend my own settings then show you those settings in action, but there is always a risk with overclocking any hardware, you are after all pushing it beyond manufacturer specification.

Validation is available here

While not many will be wanting to run a 1100T at 4.4ghz, I am confident that even an overclocking novice should be able to get this processor to a reasonable level of overclock, such as 4ghz, or higher. Much depends on your motherboard, choice of cooler, and level of expertise (patience?), but it really isn't such a dark art.

Our review systems of choice are as follows. Special thanks to both Intel and AMD for supplying the hardware.

Intel's Turbo feature at default clock speeds is left enabled.

Main Review system:

Processor: AMD Phenom II X6 1100T Black Edition
Processor: AMD Phenom II X6 1055T
Memory: Kingston HyperX 8GB 1600Mhz Kit
Motherboard: MSI 890GXM-G65 (MS-7642)
Graphics Card: HIS HD6870 Turbo Edition
Power Supply: Thermaltake ToughPower Grand 750W
Chassis: Antec Dark Fleet DF-85
Cooler: Noctua NH D14
Drive: Intel 80GB SSD

Intel Review System 1:
Processor: Intel Core i7 950
Memory: Crucial Ballistix Tracer 6GB 1600mhz
Motherboard: AsRock X58 Extreme6
Graphics Card: AMD HD6850
Power Supply: Thermaltake ToughPower Grand 750W
Chassis: Antec Dark Fleet DF-85
Cooler: Noctua NH D14
Drive: Kingston 128GB SSD

Intel Review System 2:
Processor: Intel Core i7 970
Memory: GSkill 6GB DDR3-2133mhz
Motherboard: MSI X58A-GD65 (MS-7522)
Graphics Cards: Gigabyte GTX460 Sli OC
Power Supply: Corsair AX1200
Chassis: Thermaltake Level 10
Cooler: Coolit Vantage
Drive: OCZ 128GB SSD/Kingston 256GB SSD

Software:
Windows 7 64 bit Enterprise Edition SP1 (fully updated)
FRAPS
PC Mark Vantage
SiSoft Sandra
Cinebench R11.5 64 bit
Cyberlink Media Espresso V6
3D Studio Max 2011

When settling on a high end air cooler that most people can afford, we really had no hesitation in shortlisting the Noctua NH D14 heatsink, which we affectionately have dubbed the “Austrian Sandwich”. This cooler has yet to be dethroned as the best heatsink on the market, and while some publications have been rather dismissive of this solution, we simply have yet to use a more formidable air cooler.

The only downside is the £70 asking price, but in this case it really is worth every penny. I can think of no better partner for an unlocked processor.

For our review today, we added an additional 14cm Noctua fan, settling on a 14cmx2 and 12cmx1 configuration – blowing air in tandem from right to left. This produces very little noise but creates massive levels of airflow, and even at 4.4ghz with 1.6 volts coursing through the processor, the heatsink remained cool to the touch. While the Antec Dark Fleet DF 85 has also received critical attacks due to its somewhat unusual appearance, it is one of the best airflow chassis on the market with 7 large (quiet) fans installed.

It is worth addressing the AMD temperature guidelines, because they state that a 62c thermal threshold should not be exceeded. We actually agree with them on this, and prefer to see the 6 core X6 processors hitting load at no more than 55c. AMD motherboards can be rather flaky when it comes to temperature readings so we placed a diode on our 1100T to measure temperatures at various speeds and voltages.

Room temperature was held at 25c with air conditioning.

As you can see, our faith in the epic Noctua NH D14 is well placed. Even under extended load with 1.57 volts pumping through the chip, the 1100T remained under 50c. Excellent results and safe, long term temperatures for a 1ghz overclock on a 6 core cpu.

Before we head into our result testing of the AMD X6 1100T Black Edition we felt it was important to get baseline results from a couple of processors.

Firstly we selected the Phenom II X6 1055T – the bargain, value for money 6 core processor that has sold exceptionally well for AMD in 2010. In the past we showed you how to get a 900mhz overclock from this CPU with minimal effort, so it makes for a great value for money purchase, especially for people on a budget, but who need multiple processing power for rendering and encoding. This CPU is selling right now for £150 inc vat, meaning it really is still one of the best bargains out there. This is also the processor that many AMD performance based system owners might have today, and they are wondering if that upgrade to a 1100T is worth the money. Today we aim to find out.

We are classing this as our upgrade scenario.

Secondly, we selected the Intel Core i7 950 processor, the replacement for the Core i7 920 of yesterday (still a great purchase if you can find one online). The i7 950 sells for slightly more than the 1100T Black Edition – generally around the £250 inc vat mark. While this CPU has only four physical cores when compared to the X6 1110T's six, it does utilise Intel's Hyperthreading technology, so you end up with another four virtual cores, for a total of eight.

We are classing this as our competitor scenario.

In this review we also throw in some Intel Core i7 970 performance results. Hardly a fair match, considering you could buy three 1100T's for the price of a single Core i7 970, but we want to set out and try to ascertain a real world value for money factor. But more on that later.

We are classing this as the ‘money no limits' comparison scenario.

While we could use a variety of testing today, we settled on a total of five suites, to give a good cross section of overall processing power.

Test One:

SiSoftware Sandra is a great indication of potential performance levels, we are going to take results from the Arithmetic, Multimedia and Cryptography benchmarks. We particularly like the Crypography test as it is major part of computing. Certain processes can prove slower than others, depending on their algorithms. User passwords on your home PC are encrypted, as are user passwords on web servers. Past that, cryptography is used in other areas as well, such as with creating of unbreakable locks on files or assigning a hash to a particular file (like MD5).

In Sandra's Cryptography test, the results are outputted as MB/s, higher being better. The higher the number, the faster the CPU processes through the respective algorithm.

Test Two:

Cinebench R11.5 64 bit is a particular favourite of ours, as it is a borderline ‘synthetic' application. Certainly it is a scripted benchmark, however it is based on the fantastic CINEMA 4D rendering engine, which is used by many studios and production companies worldwide for 3D content creation. You might not know, but this software was used in the creation of movies such as Star Wars, Spider man and the Chronicles Of Narnia.

Test Three:

Video Encoding: Cyberlink Media Espresso 6. We love this program at Kitguru, not only is it a great indication of how fast a processor can handle video encoding, but it also now supports video card acceleration. This means you can see just how much time you are saving if you get your graphics card to support the processor. Today we are disabling the graphics card element of the encoding process, to focus completely on the AMD and Intel Solutions.

Test Four:

Rendering: 3D Studio Max 2011. This is another professional level software package that offers uses integrated 3D modeling, animation, rendering, and compositing capabilities. It delivers differentiated experiences and specialized toolsets for game developers, visual effects artists, and graphic designers on the one hand, and architects, designers, engineers, and visualization specialists on the other. We render a customised Kitguru scene at 3000×2500 and record the time taken, lower is better.

Test Five:

PC Mark Vantage. This PC benchmark suite is designed for Windows and offers one-click simplicity for casual users and detailed, professional grade testing for industry, press and enthusiasts. A PCMark score is a measure of your computer’s performance across a variety of common tasks such as viewing and editing photos, video, music and other media, gaming, communications, productivity and security.

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

We can see that the Core i7 950 processor is delivering great levels of performance across the board. Surprisingly the cheaper, lower clocked 1055T manages a victory with the AES246-ECB Cryptographic Bandwidth test, but we know that AMD are strong with this particular test.

CINEBENCH R11.5 64 Bit 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.

A fairly close set of results, the six physical cores of the 1055T help, even with the clock deficiencies.

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.

We are using a 3.3gb MKV file today at 2 hours and 12 minutes in length. We are converting to a final output for an Apple Media Player, a real world situation facing many people. Graphics card acceleration is disabled, so we are solely weighing in processor performance.

The Intel Core i7 950 dramatically outpowers the AMD 1055T with our video encoding test, over six minutes are saved.

V2011 is the first release of 3DStudio Max to fully support the Windows 7 operating system. This is a professional level tool that many people use for work purposes and our test will show any possible differences between board design today.

Autodesk 3ds Max Design 2011 software offers compelling new techniques to help bring designs to life by aggregating data, iterating ideas, and presenting the results.

Streamlined, more intelligent data exchange workflows and innovative new modeling and visualization tools help significantly increase designers’ creativity and productivity, enabling them to better explore, validate, and communicate the stories behind their designs.

Major new features:

• Slate: A node based material editor.
• Quicksilver: Hardware renderer with multithreaded rendering engine that utilizes both CPU and GPU.
• Extended Graphite Modeling Toolset
• 3ds Max Composite: A HDRI-capable compositor based on Autodesk Toxik.
• Viewport Canvas toolset for 3D and 2D texture painting directly in the viewport
• Object Painting: use 3D geometry as ‘brushes’ on other geometry
• Character Animation Toolkit (CAT): now integrated as part of the base package
• Autodesk Material Library: Over 1200 new photometrically accurate shaders
• Additional file format support: includes native support for Sketchup, Inventor
• FBX file linking
• Save to Previous Release (2010)

We render a customised Kitguru scene at 3000×2500 and record the time taken, lower is better.

The Intel solution again outpowers the AMD 1055T with our rendering test.

PCMark Vantage is a PC benchmark suite designed for Windows Vista offering one-click simplicity for casual users and detailed, professional grade testing for industry, press and enthusiasts.

A PCMark score is a measure of your computer’s performance across a variety of common tasks such as viewing and editing photos, video, music and other media, gaming, communications, productivity and security.

From desktops and laptops to workstations and gaming rigs, by comparing your PCMark Vantage score with other similar systems you can find the hardware and software bottlenecks that stop you getting more from your PC.

Please be aware that these systems are all using different motherboards, memory and hard drives, so some variances will occur.

Pretty much the results we expected, and handy as a baseline result for the main testing on the next pages.

Today we are using the MSI 890GXM-G65 motherboard with the latest V1.7 bios released a short while ago. We have read some negative reports about this board in recent months, with some instability issues mentioned – however in our testing since it was released our board has been extremely well behaved and a fantastic overclocking product.

It isn't a particularly high end board either, costing only £100 inc vat in the UK. We achieved no better overclocking results with the Asus Crosshair IV Formula board we have in our labs.

Performance settings for this series of results at reference speeds were kept to the bios defaults.

MSI literature for the board is as follows:
World Leading Motherboard and Graphics manufacturer, MSI, launches their brand new 890GXM-G65 Motherboard using the AMD 890GX chipset to fulfil the increasing demand for the perfect home theatre PC. In addition to tailoring to the latest AMD Phenom II processors, the 890GXM-G65 provides full support for the DirectX 10.1 and UVD 2.0 Multimedia standards to significantly enhance High-Definition audio and video effects. Along with a wide variety of output interfaces, the 890GXM-G65 allows users to build a high quality HTPC combining both high performance and high stability

The 890GXM-G65 is not only a perfect HTPC motherboard, it also allows users to unlock the full potential of their CPU for maximum performance. By allowing users to unlock up to six cores the MSI 890GXM-G65 enhances performance and saves energy. unlocking addition cores on the CPU has become the hot topic of PC users lately and this board with integrated ATI Radeon HD 4290 Graphics redefines the first choice of a fully featured motherboard.

The 890GXM-G65 includes support for DirectX 10.1, ATI Hybrid Crossfire, ATI CrossfireX for installing two high performance ATI graphics cards, USB3.0 and native SATA-III (6Gbps) for maximum data transfer speeds.

Key Features

• AMD 890GX chipset based
• Supports USB 3.0 and SATA 3.0
• OC Genie Lite: Easy Overclocking Technology
• Superb Stability: Military Class Components
• Fully-equipped Digital Output Connectors: HDMI & DVI
• Lossless 24bit/192kHz HD Audio
• Highly-efficienct HeatPipe Thermal Design

Specifications

• Support for AMD Athlon II & Phenom II Processors
• HyperTransport 3.0 supporting speed up to 5200MT/s
• AMD 890GX and SB850 Chipset
• Integrated ATI Radeon HD4290 GPU
• 4x unbuffered DIMM DDR3 800/1066/1333/1600*/1800*/2133* (OC) DRAM, 16GB Max
• 2x PCI Express x16 slot (8x 8x in multi-GPU configuration)
• 1x PCI Express x1 slot
• 1x PCI slot, support 3.3V/ 5V PCI bus Interface
• One IDE port Supports Ultra DMA 66/100/133 mode
• 5x SATA III (6Gbps) support RAID 0, 1, 5, 10 mode
• 1x eSATA
• Flexible 8-channel HD audio with jack sensing
• Gigabit LAN

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

The AMD 1100T lags behind the Core i7 950 in the Arithmetic tests, but manages a win with the multimedia Float x8 test. It also wins both Cryptography tests by a clear margin, one of AMD's strengths.

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.

The 1100T's six physical cores at 3.3ghz, manage to outperform Intel's 4x physical and 4x virtual at 3.06 ghz … scoring 5.78 with the Cinema 4D rendering engine compared to Intel's 5.37.

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.

We are using a 3.3gb MKV file today at 2 hours and 12 minutes in length. We are converting to a final output for an Apple Media Player, a real world situation facing many people. Graphics card acceleration is disabled, so we are solely weighing in processor performance.

At 3.3ghz, we manage to shave off around 2 minutes and 30 seconds of encoding time when compared with the 1055T. The 1100T is still around 4 minutes slower than the Core i7 950 however.

V2011 is the first release of 3DStudio Max to fully support the Windows 7 operating system. This is a professional level tool that many people use for work purposes and our test will show any possible differences between board design today.

Autodesk 3ds Max Design 2011 software offers compelling new techniques to help bring designs to life by aggregating data, iterating ideas, and presenting the results.

Streamlined, more intelligent data exchange workflows and innovative new modeling and visualization tools help significantly increase designers’ creativity and productivity, enabling them to better explore, validate, and communicate the stories behind their designs.

Major new features:

• Slate: A node based material editor.
• Quicksilver: Hardware renderer with multithreaded rendering engine that utilizes both CPU and GPU.
• Extended Graphite Modeling Toolset
• 3ds Max Composite: A HDRI-capable compositor based on Autodesk Toxik.
• Viewport Canvas toolset for 3D and 2D texture painting directly in the viewport
• Object Painting: use 3D geometry as ‘brushes’ on other geometry
• Character Animation Toolkit (CAT): now integrated as part of the base package
• Autodesk Material Library: Over 1200 new photometrically accurate shaders
• Additional file format support: includes native support for Sketchup, Inventor
• FBX file linking
• Save to Previous Release (2010)

We render a customised Kitguru scene at 3000×2500 and record the time taken, lower is better.

The 1100T is 18 seconds faster than the 1055T, but 25 seconds slower than the Core i7 950.

PCMark Vantage is a PC benchmark suite designed for Windows Vista offering one-click simplicity for casual users and detailed, professional grade testing for industry, press and enthusiasts.

A PCMark score is a measure of your computer’s performance across a variety of common tasks such as viewing and editing photos, video, music and other media, gaming, communications, productivity and security.

From desktops and laptops to workstations and gaming rigs, by comparing your PCMark Vantage score with other similar systems you can find the hardware and software bottlenecks that stop you getting more from your PC.

Please be aware that these systems are all using different motherboards, memory and hard drives, so some variances will occur.

A very strong showing from the 1100T Black Edition, managing to keep the Intel Core i7 950 in its sights.

So now that we have tested our two base Intel and AMD systems, and have compared them against the reference clocked AMD Phenom II X6 1100T, it is time to proceed with the early stages of our overclocking in the MSI bios.

All bioses will be different, but as the Black Editions are multiplier unlocked it is simply a case of increasing the CPU ratio to x19 to achieve the 3,800mhz figure we want. You can also disable cool n quiet and turbo settings. ‘auto' on this board will disable them at our overclocked settings, but you can turn it off manually if you wish.

Overclocking processors can be a time consuming process. You need to ensure that load temperatures remain within safe parameters and that your memory stays within limitations. We have adjusted the FSB/DRAM Ratio to hold at 1:4 (1600mhz) and have increased voltage to 1.38v for complete stability – as we are using the Noctua NH D14, this does not prove an issue.

I know many enthusiasts play with the NB VDD voltage, but I have never really found this is a prime concern with a Black Edition processor. With a locked processor it can certainly help with stability at higher FSB frequencies as you try to achieve higher clock speeds, but if you increase it to the higher settings it can add a lot of strain to the circuitry. You can also adjust the HT Link frequency to higher speeds if you wish, but when checking processor stability under overclocked situations, it is worth narrowing down the potential sources of any instability.

This can then be stored to the one of the six available overclocking profiles within this particular bios for easy recall and adjustment later.

System validation is available here.

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

Even with an 800mhz clock  advantage, the arithmetic performance of the 1100T is lower than the Core i7 950. Multimedia floating point performance is way out in front now however and the Cryptography results are significantly improved.

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.

At 3.8ghz, the AMD 1100T score has jumped to 6.62.

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.

We are using a 3.3gb MKV file today at 2 hours and 12 minutes in length. We are converting to a final output for an Apple Media Player, a real world situation facing many people. Graphics card acceleration is disabled, so we are solely weighing in processor performance.

The 500mhz overclock has helped to drop the encoding times to under 16 minutes, this is around 5 minutes faster than the X6 1055T which is now running 1ghz slower.

V2011 is the first release of 3DStudio Max to fully support the Windows 7 operating system. This is a professional level tool that many people use for work purposes and our test will show any possible differences between board design today.

Autodesk 3ds Max Design 2011 software offers compelling new techniques to help bring designs to life by aggregating data, iterating ideas, and presenting the results.

Streamlined, more intelligent data exchange workflows and innovative new modeling and visualization tools help significantly increase designers’ creativity and productivity, enabling them to better explore, validate, and communicate the stories behind their designs.

Major new features:

• Slate: A node based material editor.
• Quicksilver: Hardware renderer with multithreaded rendering engine that utilizes both CPU and GPU.
• Extended Graphite Modeling Toolset
• 3ds Max Composite: A HDRI-capable compositor based on Autodesk Toxik.
• Viewport Canvas toolset for 3D and 2D texture painting directly in the viewport
• Object Painting: use 3D geometry as ‘brushes’ on other geometry
• Character Animation Toolkit (CAT): now integrated as part of the base package
• Autodesk Material Library: Over 1200 new photometrically accurate shaders
• Additional file format support: includes native support for Sketchup, Inventor
• FBX file linking
• Save to Previous Release (2010)

We render a customised Kitguru scene at 3000×2500 and record the time taken, lower is better.

The X6 1100T is catching up now to the Core i7 950, rendering the scene in almost the same time. Intels combination of 4 physical cores and 4 logical cores proves very benefical with 3D Studio Max.

PCMark Vantage is a PC benchmark suite designed for Windows Vista offering one-click simplicity for casual users and detailed, professional grade testing for industry, press and enthusiasts.

A PCMark score is a measure of your computer’s performance across a variety of common tasks such as viewing and editing photos, video, music and other media, gaming, communications, productivity and security.

From desktops and laptops to workstations and gaming rigs, by comparing your PCMark Vantage score with other similar systems you can find the hardware and software bottlenecks that stop you getting more from your PC.

Please be aware that these systems are all using different motherboards, memory and hard drives, so some variances will occur.

The AMD X6 1100T is pulling out in the lead now, thanks to the clock advantage.

3.8ghz is easy enough with any AMD Phenom II X6 processor, even with modest air cooling, but to achieve 4ghz + requires time and some TLC.

To reach 4ghz, the multiplier was increased to 4ghz with the FSB set to 200 mhz. There are other ways to reach 4 ghz, for example by lowering the multiplier to 18 or 19 and increasing the FSB, but we want to keep things uniform for the time being. Make sure that your memory is running within specifications if you overclock the FSB, otherwise this can lead to instability often confused with processor limitations.

We found stability at 4ghz with a voltage of 1.536 in this particular bios. Again we didn't need to adjust any other settings, such as NB voltage to achieve stability, automatic settings were sufficient.

Once we achieved stability, we can save this setting into the overclocking profile section of the MSI motherboard bios.

Validation for this clock speed can be confirmed over here.

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

Although the AMD processors are inherently weaker with the Arithmetic benchmark the clock advantage means that the 1100T Black Edition has pulled out in the lead. Multimedia Integer tests show an advantage still for the Intel solution, while the floating point performance figures are significantly reversed. Cryptography scores are great for the AMD processor at this speed.

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.

A modest boost from 3.8ghz to 4.0ghz, scoring 6.65, a good score for 6 cores.

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.

We are using a 3.3gb MKV file today at 2 hours and 12 minutes in length. We are converting to a final output for an Apple Media Player, a real world situation facing many people. Graphics card acceleration is disabled, so we are solely weighing in processor performance.

At 4ghz, the time taken for the X6 1100T is 15 minutes and 22 seconds, 49 seconds more than the Core i7 950. The extra two logical cores and memory bandwidth are helping the Intel system to remain in front.

V2011 is the first release of 3DStudio Max to fully support the Windows 7 operating system. This is a professional level tool that many people use for work purposes and our test will show any possible differences between board design today.

Autodesk 3ds Max Design 2011 software offers compelling new techniques to help bring designs to life by aggregating data, iterating ideas, and presenting the results.

Streamlined, more intelligent data exchange workflows and innovative new modeling and visualization tools help significantly increase designers’ creativity and productivity, enabling them to better explore, validate, and communicate the stories behind their designs.

Major new features:

• Slate: A node based material editor.
• Quicksilver: Hardware renderer with multithreaded rendering engine that utilizes both CPU and GPU.
• Extended Graphite Modeling Toolset
• 3ds Max Composite: A HDRI-capable compositor based on Autodesk Toxik.
• Viewport Canvas toolset for 3D and 2D texture painting directly in the viewport
• Object Painting: use 3D geometry as ‘brushes’ on other geometry
• Character Animation Toolkit (CAT): now integrated as part of the base package
• Autodesk Material Library: Over 1200 new photometrically accurate shaders
• Additional file format support: includes native support for Sketchup, Inventor
• FBX file linking
• Save to Previous Release (2010)

We render a customised Kitguru scene at 3000×2500 and record the time taken, lower is better.

With the core clock advantage now firmly in the 1100T's hands, it manages to surpass the Core i7 950, even though it has two extra logical cores.

PCMark Vantage is a PC benchmark suite designed for Windows Vista offering one-click simplicity for casual users and detailed, professional grade testing for industry, press and enthusiasts.

A PCMark score is a measure of your computer’s performance across a variety of common tasks such as viewing and editing photos, video, music and other media, gaming, communications, productivity and security.

From desktops and laptops to workstations and gaming rigs, by comparing your PCMark Vantage score with other similar systems you can find the hardware and software bottlenecks that stop you getting more from your PC.

Please be aware that these systems are all using different motherboards, memory and hard drives, so some variances will occur.

Almost at 17k now with the music tests and just over 9k with the memories benchmarking.

To achieve 4.2ghz with the AMD Phenom II X6 1110T, a high end cooler is required, and our Noctua NH D14 managed to hold the processor well with AMD's 62c thermal rating. As we documented earlier, the processor never exceeded 45c thanks in part to our custom 3 fan configuration.

This time we decided to increase the CPU FSB frequency, as the extra bandwidth can help with performance. We know this particular board is stable until 260fsb so we are still well within the parameters.

Voltage is increased to 1.556 as we experienced some BSOD issues with lower settings. We also experimented with the NB VDD voltage, but found that auto figures worked fine to maintain a stable system. Memory can be pushed higher, although with these particular 4GB sticks we find that keeping the timings tight at lower settings gives better performance.

This profile can be saved to one of the six positions in the MSI motherboard bios.

System validation is available over here.

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

At 4.2ghz the Phenom II X6 1100T is a formidable processing powerhouse – the Cryptography results are stunning.

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.

With clock speeds at 4.2ghz the AMD Phenom II X6 scores 7.3, making a firm foundation for a high end rendering 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.

We are using a 3.3gb MKV file today at 2 hours and 12 minutes in length. We are converting to a final output for an Apple Media Player, a real world situation facing many people. Graphics card acceleration is disabled, so we are solely weighing in processor performance.

The 1100T has struggled with this benchmark today, still not able to beat the reference clocked Core i7 950.

V2011 is the first release of 3DStudio Max to fully support the Windows 7 operating system. This is a professional level tool that many people use for work purposes and our test will show any possible differences between board design today.

Autodesk 3ds Max Design 2011 software offers compelling new techniques to help bring designs to life by aggregating data, iterating ideas, and presenting the results.

Streamlined, more intelligent data exchange workflows and innovative new modeling and visualization tools help significantly increase designers’ creativity and productivity, enabling them to better explore, validate, and communicate the stories behind their designs.

Major new features:

• Slate: A node based material editor.
• Quicksilver: Hardware renderer with multithreaded rendering engine that utilizes both CPU and GPU.
• Extended Graphite Modeling Toolset
• 3ds Max Composite: A HDRI-capable compositor based on Autodesk Toxik.
• Viewport Canvas toolset for 3D and 2D texture painting directly in the viewport
• Object Painting: use 3D geometry as ‘brushes’ on other geometry
• Character Animation Toolkit (CAT): now integrated as part of the base package
• Autodesk Material Library: Over 1200 new photometrically accurate shaders
• Additional file format support: includes native support for Sketchup, Inventor
• FBX file linking
• Save to Previous Release (2010)

We render a customised Kitguru scene at 3000×2500 and record the time taken, lower is better.

A 13 second advantage now compared to the reference clocked Intel Core i7 950.

PCMark Vantage is a PC benchmark suite designed for Windows Vista offering one-click simplicity for casual users and detailed, professional grade testing for industry, press and enthusiasts.

A PCMark score is a measure of your computer’s performance across a variety of common tasks such as viewing and editing photos, video, music and other media, gaming, communications, productivity and security.

From desktops and laptops to workstations and gaming rigs, by comparing your PCMark Vantage score with other similar systems you can find the hardware and software bottlenecks that stop you getting more from your PC.

Please be aware that these systems are all using different motherboards, memory and hard drives, so some variances will occur.

Pretty much as we expected with integral increases as we push upwards into the 4ghz zone.

There is a good possibility that not all AMD Phenom II X6 1100T's will reach 4.3ghz, but we managed to get our review sample stable, with a borderline ‘safe' level of voltage. As we discussed earlier, it is my view that once you reach 1.57 volts, then you need to be very careful and long term damage can be caused if you have inadequate cooling and try pushing further. I know some people have had X6's die with 1.6 volts, and others have been running them at this voltage for a long time now. If you decide to overclock your Phenom II X6 this far then please realise that you do so at your own risk.

My rule of thumb is to constantly monitor temperatures during an initial trial period, even if you use a hardcore air cooler such as the Noctua NH D14. if you record core load temperatures of 60C+ then you need to start backing down with the voltage.

We set a multipler of 19x with an fsb of 227 to achieve our final result of 4313mhz. As we mentioned earlier, this processor will boot at 4.4ghz, but it requires 1.6 volts to achieve stability, not something im willing to risk long term. Knowing when to stop is important when you overclock!

This is as much voltage as I feel is safe with an X6 processor. Sure, its considerably more than AMD's rating of 1.4v, but we have tested many X6's at this voltage for many months and have experienced no failures. Hardcore air cooling is necessary however – Noctua NH D14 recommended.

Once we have finished, we have all our profiles stored in the profile section of the MSI motherboard bios.

Validation for this speed is available over here.

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

As expected, with such a high overclock, the X6 1100T delivers some stunning levels of performance across all these tests.

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.

At 4.3ghz, the 1100T delivers incredibly high levels of rendering performance – six cores is a great design once you get software that takes advantage of them all.

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.

We are using a 3.3gb MKV file today at 2 hours and 12 minutes in length. We are converting to a final output for an Apple Media Player, a real world situation facing many people. Graphics card acceleration is disabled, so we are solely weighing in processor performance.

Finally the 1100T has managed to beat the reference clocked Core i7 950, by six seconds. Clearly the Intel architecture has significant advantages with this particular rendering software.

V2011 is the first release of 3DStudio Max to fully support the Windows 7 operating system. This is a professional level tool that many people use for work purposes and our test will show any possible differences between board design today.

Autodesk 3ds Max Design 2011 software offers compelling new techniques to help bring designs to life by aggregating data, iterating ideas, and presenting the results.

Streamlined, more intelligent data exchange workflows and innovative new modeling and visualization tools help significantly increase designers’ creativity and productivity, enabling them to better explore, validate, and communicate the stories behind their designs.

Major new features:

• Slate: A node based material editor.
• Quicksilver: Hardware renderer with multithreaded rendering engine that utilizes both CPU and GPU.
• Extended Graphite Modeling Toolset
• 3ds Max Composite: A HDRI-capable compositor based on Autodesk Toxik.
• Viewport Canvas toolset for 3D and 2D texture painting directly in the viewport
• Object Painting: use 3D geometry as ‘brushes’ on other geometry
• Character Animation Toolkit (CAT): now integrated as part of the base package
• Autodesk Material Library: Over 1200 new photometrically accurate shaders
• Additional file format support: includes native support for Sketchup, Inventor
• FBX file linking
• Save to Previous Release (2010)

We render a customised Kitguru scene at 3000×2500 and record the time taken, lower is better.

A 23 second advantage now for the 1100T, however there is a significant clock differential also.

PCMark Vantage is a PC benchmark suite designed for Windows Vista offering one-click simplicity for casual users and detailed, professional grade testing for industry, press and enthusiasts.

A PCMark score is a measure of your computer’s performance across a variety of common tasks such as viewing and editing photos, video, music and other media, gaming, communications, productivity and security.

From desktops and laptops to workstations and gaming rigs, by comparing your PCMark Vantage score with other similar systems you can find the hardware and software bottlenecks that stop you getting more from your PC.

Please be aware that these systems are all using different motherboards, memory and hard drives, so some variances will occur.

Scaling is pretty much in line with the other results, showing great results for this AMD system.

So far we have been concentrating on the AMD Phenom II X6 1100T's overclocking performance results with a handful of bios configurations at various clock speeds and voltages.

We wanted to show some comparisons with the Intel Core i7 950, clocked to 3.8ghz with a 0.18 voltage increase.

The AMD Phenom II 1100T Black Edition outperforms the Intel Core i7 950 with the Cinema 4D rendering engine at the same clock speeds. Two extra physical cores clearly outweigh additional logical cores.

The architecture of the Intel Core i7 950 processor means that even at 3.8ghz, it is able to outperform the AMD solution with a 500mhz clock advantage.

Sandra benchmark tests show a mixed bag of results. The Intel Core i7 950 has considerable Arithmetic power but falls behind with floating point throughput and Cryptography calculations.

The Core i7 950 delivers stronger performance with Studio Max at the same clock speeds.

It would be remiss of our not to include any results from either the Intel Core i7 970 or 980X, after all they are Intel's high end ‘6 core processors'. To be fair, they are three times the price of the 1100T and it is therefore very hard to effectively evaluate them side by side. We don't work for either company however so we felt this was an interesting addition to the review, even if few people would be willing to spend over £700 on a processor.

On this page we will compare the AMD Phenom II against a reference clocked Intel Core i7 970 processor.

While the 1100T can hold onto the performance levels of the Core i7 950 in some of these tests, the 970 is considerably faster, even with the Crypography AES256 and SHA256 tests.

For rendering and video encoding, the Core i7 is a clear performance winner.

For this series of tests, we compare both Intel Core i7 970 at 4ghz, against the AMD Phenom II X6 1110T at 4ghz. This would be an easily achieveable overclock with good cooling.

At 4ghz, the Intel Core i7 970 pulls away from the identically clocked AMD Phenom II x6 1110T. While the 1100T is able to outperform the Core i7 950 in the Cryptography benchmark, the Core i7 970 is significantly in the lead.

Again, the Core i7 970 at 4ghz is a literal rendering and encoding tour de force. To get things into perspective however, it is worth reiterating that the Core i7 970 is three times the price of the AMD X6 1100T.

For our final ‘Flagship 6 core testing', we crank both processors to 4.3ghz and compare the results again.

Validation of the Core i7 970 processor at this speed is available over here.

The Core i7 970 delivers stunning AES256 levels of performance in the Cryptography benchmark scoring just shy of 9GB.

At 4.3ghz, the Core i7 970 managed to deliver a sub 10 minute encoding result with Espresso, over 4 minutes faster than the 1100T at the same clock speeds. Cinema 4D rendering also shows huge performance increases when moving to the flagship Intel solutions.

Our overclocking performance guide has been split into many sections, but we feel it is important to take some of these results and try to ascertain final performance factors and subsequent value for money ratios.

Let's have a look at professional level 3D rendering.

At the time of press these are the current UK prices:

Intel Core i7 970 – £705 inc vat
Intel Core i7 950 – £245 inc vat
AMD Phenom II X6 1100T Black Edition – £225 inc vat
AMD Phenom II X6 1055T – £150 inc vat

Without a question the Core i7 970 is the performance leader in our cross section of testing, synthetic tests such as Sandra show that at any given clock speed, it is a clear leader, obviously this is to be expected at £700, but no AMD processor can get close.

The Core i7 950 however proves to be fairly closely related on a performance level to the X6 1100T Black Edition.

In Cinema 4D, the X6 1100T clearly delivers high levels of performance for the price, and our analysis shows that at reference clock speeds it gives a 7.6 percent performance boost over the Core i7 950, while costing £20 less in the UK.

Next, taking these percentages of increase into consideration, we create a scene which takes 2 hours (120 minutes) to render on the Phenom II X6 1055T at reference clocks and compare costs and time savings to the other processors on test today. Obviously it goes without saying that this is the cost for a ‘single' run. Savings from using a faster, more capable processor would incrementally mount up over the course of weeks and months.

Our analysis shows that when moving from the 1055T to the Core i7 950 that you are paying over £10 for every minute of time saved. Moving from the Core i7 950 to the Phenom II X6 1100T actually saves you £2.22 per minute of rendering time, as the 1100T completes the job faster.

While the Intel Core i7 970 seems like an expensive processor, within the professional industry, the time saving for this kind of work would easily pay for itself over a very short period of time.

The AMD Phenom II X6 1100T Black Edition is not a launch that many people have been waiting on with baited breath, as it is a core clock boosted X6 1090T Black Edition. An evolutionary release – not a new design from the ground up, we will have to wait a while longer for that.

Perhaps we were lucky with our sample but we found that 4.3ghz was easily achievable with high end air cooling and the potential is there for 4.4ghz+, if you are willing to risk 1.6 volts (or more) with a quality watercooling configuration. Our 1090T samples have always had trouble getting to 4.1ghz and beyond. As far as we are concerned, this is AMD's finest processor to date and in certain situations can match, or beat Intel's Core i7 950 Quad Core, which is slightly more expensive.

Cryptography performance is exceptional, showing that for specific mathematical calculations such as Hash algorithms and security related encryption and decryption the AMD X6 1100T makes for a very low cost, high performance choice.

3D encoding performance is also an area in which the X6 1100T shines, with the Cinema 4D engine showing real world gains with the extra physical cores, rather than Intel's Hyperthreaded boosted configuration. The Intel Core i7 950 is a fantastic processor, but within the realms of multi threaded physical processing, the X6 1100T is more than a match for Intel's mid range chip.

AMD are always wanting to focus on the price points they can achieve and £225 for this processor is surely one of the bargains of the year. Sure, the 1090T has dropped to £200 now, and the 1055T can be picked up for £150 – but the 1100T is such a straightforward processor to overclock that 4.1ghz is easily reached with minimal effort. If you however have little interest in overclocking and don't need to squeeze every drop of performance from your CPU then the 1055T is a wise choice – 6 cores for £150 is hard to ignore.

We have been exceptionally impressed with this latest offering from AMD – they have yet to mount an attack on the high end Intel Core i7 processors such as the 970 and 980x, but in the lucrative mid range market their X6 Black Edition processors continue to shine.

KitGuru says: 6 unlocked physical cores for £225: 4.3ghz+ is easily possible – time to upgrade to a Noctua NH D14.

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