Phenom II X6 Compatibility, Over 170 Boards Supported at Launch
by Anand Lal Shimpi on April 27, 2010 11:07 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- Phenom II X6
- Motherboards
Earlier today AMD announced its Phenom II X6 processors. One vendor even started offering them at a huge discount if you're willing to put up with a mail in rebate. The X6 is quite possibly the most affordable route to tons of threaded compute power. If you do a lot of video encoding or offline 3D rendering, for $150 you can't beat the deal TigerDirect is running on the 1055T. And it looks to be a beast of an overclocker.
The new X6s are supposed to work in all Socket-AM2+ and Socket-AM3 motherboards, all you need is a BIOS update. Many of you asked for a performance comparison between AM2+ and AM3 with the X6, but I quickly realized that none of the boards I had around the lab supported the chip. I decided to do a quick survey of all of the motherboard manufacturers to see who was ahead of the game on enabling Phenom II X6 support:
| AMD Phenom II X6 Support at Launch | ||||||||
| ASRock | ASUS | Biostar | ECS | Gigabyte | MSI | |||
| Number of AM2+ Boards Supported at Launch | 10 | 19 | 7 | 16 | 4 | 11 | ||
| Total Boards Supported (AM2+/AM3) | 28 | 37 | 23 | 26 | 43* | 22 | ||
ASUS and Gigabyte lead the charge with 37 and 43 boards supported at launch. The star next to Gigabyte's number means that you'll have to do some digging to find all of the Gigabyte boards with support. The CPU supported list only lists 10 boards but if you dig through Gigabyte's BIOS pages you'll find a lot more. In terms of older AM2+ boards, ASUS and ECS support 19 and 16 respectively. AMD tells us that the priority is to enable AM3 motherboards so over the coming weeks we'll see the AM2+ numbers climb.
Have any of you pulled the trigger on a Phenom II X6 purchase? What board are you pairing it with? Leave your experiences in the comments!
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silverblue - Thursday, April 29, 2010 - link
...GA-MA78G-DS3H (rev. 1.0 or 2.x) yet.Burticus - Thursday, April 29, 2010 - link
I have an EVGA 730A and the latest bios E113 is over a year old. I posted on the forums asking about it but nothing yet. Currently running a Phenom II x3 710, would like to double my core count for BD reauthoring...xsilver - Sunday, May 2, 2010 - link
hey anand are you going to do some benches with ddr2 boards with the x6 ? Its mentioned in the review that the x6 is already slightly crippled by the dual channel memory - how much more crippled is it going to be with ddr2?minghi - Tuesday, May 4, 2010 - link
just paired my new shiny amd 1055t with gigabyte ga-ma785gm-us2h v1.1 and 800mhz ddr2 ram (hp nanya) and it booted right up after a nice bios (F10) update... woohoo... but I wonder if I can see 25% improvement if I upgraded to DDR3 & 890FX???asanurag18 - Tuesday, January 11, 2011 - link
pls prefer me which motherboard i should buy without compromisin performence n cheaper