Well there you have it. AMD have provided another excellent processor for the price conscious enthusiast.

I'd certainly recommend a decent motherboard if you wanted to heavily clock the 1055T as the ECS I initially used certainly didn't seem to like it at anything over 400MHz beyond stock.



Gaming performance certainly goes in line with the many second generation Phenom and Athlons I've had the pleasure of testing. I would say though that for the majority of gaming situations an overclocked quad core may well be sufficient for the near future.

General desktop performance is definitely more than comparable to the i5 and i7 quad core competition from Intel. Those extra cores do provide the additional grunt that help encoding and rendering to complete faster.

All in all it's been a very impressive chip. It clocks well in a suitably competent motherboard, run's particularly cool at stock clock speeds, doesn't cost much at all and provides very respectable performance. Add the Turbo Core feature that temporarily boosts CPU speeds when three or fewer cores are in use and also the fact that it is a hex core CPU and you have the ingredients for a very nice chip.



The Phenom II 1055T is a little marvel of modern technology. Six cores all crammed into one chip and for such an affordable price too. Even competing Black Edition Phenom II quad cores (965 and 970) are either similarly priced or more. Yes they have unlocked multipliers (and in the case of the 970 'might' be a deactivated hex core - gamble in itself) but if you have the right motherboard you'll be able to clock the 1055T close to what they can manage and all the while have an additional couple of cores at your disposal!