AMD Phenom II X6 1100T Black Edition 3.3GHz CPU Review

Colin McRae: DiRT2

Colin McRae: DiRT 2 is one of the most anticipated racing games of the year and will take full advantage of DirectX 11, adding realism to the racing environment. The game also will have hardware tessellation that is said to improve the appearance of water and other surfaces, as well as crowd animations. Utilizing the EGO Engine, DiRT 2 should raise the bar for PC gaming and is a definite must-have for PC gamers as it will have cars and tracks twice as detailed as those seen in Race Driver: GRID. To test I use the high presets with no AA.

Benchmark Results: Interestingly, we lost a couple of frames per second at 1280×1024 with the faster AMD Phenom II X6 1100T Black Edition. Though at higher resolutions we saw a slight performance gain and the AMD Phenom II X6 1100T Black Edition had the highest performance of any of the processors.

Curious about how the AMD Phenom II X6 1075T and the AMD Phenom II X6 1055T was able to out perform the Intel Core I7 930 in Colin McRae: DiRT 2. We decided to fire the game up in windowed mode and watch the CPU usage. The results were intriguing. Despite the hyper threading on the Intel Core I7 930 this particular game would only take advantage of four threads, while the AMD Phenom II X6 1055T had activity across all six of the cores. This is the reason that they were able to outperformed the higher priced Intel X58 system in this particular game benchmark, as Colin McRae: DiRT2 is clearly optimized to run on six physical cores.