Phenom II X6 Compatibility, Over 170 Boards Supported at Launch



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!



http://www.anandtech.com/show/3678/p...rted-at-launch