Application Performance

Phenom II processors are known for performing poorly in Microsoft Excel (as a number crunching benchmark, of course) and the same is true for the X6 versions. Only the Phenom II X6 1100T beat the Core i5 750 in the MonteCarlo test, while it was slightly slower for the BigNumberCrunch. Excel is one of the applications where the Core i7 980 XE really shines, and this is highlighted further when comparing its performance to AMD's processors.

As noted on the previous page, Phenom II processors do not perform well when testing with WinRAR. As you can see, the hexa-core processors perform much like the Phenom II X4 965, which is considerably slower than the Core i5 750.

Our custom Photoshop CS5 benchmark measures the time it takes for the radial blur filter to be applied to an 88MP image and is able to fully utilize six cores, or in the case of the Core i7 processors, eight threads.

The Phenom II X6 1100T didn't prove to be a great deal faster than the 1055T, let alone the 1090T. However, the six-core Phenom II processor were significantly quicker than the four-core Phenom II X4 965. The X6 1100T was 34% faster than the X4 965 and 15% faster than the Core i5 750, but it failed to surpass the mighty Core i7 processors. The X6 1100T was 21% slower than the Core i7 930 and 50% slower than Intel's six-core processor.