Opinions on the AMD Phenom II series - in particular, X6 1090T

[FragFighter]

My laptop has been on it's last stretch for the last half a year or so and I've come to the conclusion that it will cost me more to fix than it will to replace. I've been sitting on actually building a new rig for a while now, as you can see from my post here: http://www.daniweb.com/hardware-and-software/pc-hardware/motherboards-cpus-and-ram/threads/389125/choosing-a-cpu Having said that, I am now ready financially to move into a desktop. I've been looking at some different builds and the AMD Phenom II X6 1090T. Seriously considering dropping some money on this baby.

I am debating between a Phenom and going for an i7, but I'm not particularly a fan of Intel processors any more and so I've scratched those off the table. My PIII did the job at the time, but my dv6000 gave me both a love and a hate for AMD (and I look at this processor in terms of overclocking - the possibilities are endless.) I really don't see any point in jumping for the AMD FX-8150, either. I've read reviews, and it's got a love-hate going for it. Will the X6 1090T still be something that can tackle today's software - or should I look at some other processors? I'm pretty flexible in what I buy and in terms of price for the most part; I want an investment that is not necessarily the latest release but will still be able to handle future gaming and software. Because of that, I'm looking seriously at the following:

Other suggestions for CPUs?

[Fest3er]

This thread's a month old, but I'll opine anyway.

If you're gaming and play the latest and newest games, go for the fastest, hottest processor and motherboard you can buy. At present, that means Intel if money's no object.

Otherwise, if you just need good, all-round performer at a fair price, you cannot do better than the Phenom II 965 quad-core Black Edition. Newegg currently has them available for, I think, $104. Install it in a Gigabyte 990 mboard with 8GiB of the fastest GSkill memory you can put in it with 6Gb/s SATA drives and you won't be disappointed.

I have a 965 on a Gigabyte 790 mboard with 8GiB 10666 RAM. I used Arctic Silver paste for the CPU. It builds my firewall system (roadster.agcl.us) in about 100 minutes. (For comparison, a comparable Core I7 builds it in about 60 minutes. My old dual dual-Opteron 270 built it in about 140 minutes.) The build system uses all four processors when it can. Only building GCC and the linux kernel bring the CPU temp up to 58°C for several minutes. When I see the temp approaching 62°C, I know it's time to blow the dust out, and the temp drops back down to 58°C. As soon as the CPU load drops, the temp drops to 40-45°C. It idles at 27-32°C. I've had this system for a year or two and I'm still mighty pleased with it.

I've an older WD 160GB 3Gb/s SATA as the main drive, and a couple Hitachi 1TB HDS721010CLA32 drives; the Hitachi drives are far, far faster. Building the firewall on Debian Squeeze, everything is cached in RAM and disk writes happen in the background. I/O wait states are nearly always very close to 0%. (Oh, I also use reiserfs, which gives a huge boost in performance.)

In sum, if you don't need bleeding edge performance, don't play the newest games, and don't do enough to keep two CPUs very busy, the Phenom II 965 black edition on a Gigabyte mboard with the fastest RAM the board natively supports and the best Hitachi SATA drives will give you the best performance for your dollar. And if you want to overclock, the GB boards have a BIOS that enables you to tune just about everything.

IMO, of course. Your mileage may vary. Check with your doctor before engaging in strenuous computing. Avoid quiet and passive persons, unless you are in need of sleep. For a good time, call 606-4311... ask for Ken.

(Last two sentences borrowed from Tony Hendra.)

[FragFighter]

The 965 BE was actually the processor I wanted to go for, but when I looked about a month ago it was next to impossible to find. I see it's back in stock now in a couple of places.

Although I hadn't updated, this was the build I was looking at (since I'm a bit picky when it comes to hardware):
- Phenom X4 956 BE
- Asus M5A97 EVO
- Radeon HD 6790

Assorted variables:
- 550w Antec truepower
- 1TB SATA HDD

Planning on starting with 4GB RAM although I suspect with server hosting I'll want to upgrade.
Have an old optical drive sitting somewhere.

The 1090T would have been nice for server, I suspect, but terrible for gaming.

[coroneshotel2]

I have a Phenom x4 Asus mb 4 gigs of ram win7 64bit at work used for holding data and and getting rid of spyware etc from peoples hd drives they are a good work horse proc but intel i5 etc are better for gaming but each to there own likes
My home pc is intel i5 based pc