Review: AMD Phenom II X6 1090T: hexa-core computing for the masses

Overclocking

The slightly higher asking price of the Phenom II X6 1090T is a result of the chip's Black Edition moniker.

Indicating a multiplier-unlocked part, it's designed to serve the needs of the overclocking crowd with easily adjustable speeds via the system BIOS or new-and-improved AMD Overdrive utility. Using the latter, we see if there's much overclocking headroom on offer.

There's your answer, folks. Keeping to stock voltages and using a non-reference air cooler (a £30 Arctic Cooling Freezer Xtreme), we were able to apply a 20x multiplier and hit 4GHz across all six cores.

Just for fun, we were also able to push the chip up another notch by enabling a Turbo CORE boost of up to 4.2GHz using a 21x multiplier. The chip remained stable during a Prime95 stress test, but didn't enjoy going any further.

Using our air cooler, we encountered visible signs of system instability at non-Turbo speeds of over 4GHz. Nonetheless, it seems there's plenty of room to play with, and we can envisage those with liquid nitrogen at hand having plenty of fun with the chip.

How does a 25 per cent boost in core clock speed translate to real world performance? We run a series of benchmarks to compare the overclocked chip against our choice of 12 stock-clocked comparisons. Readers should note that these results don't factor in the overclocking prowess of the competitors - Intel's Core i7 930 for example is known to be a solid overclocker itself, able to hit speeds of over 4GHz on air.