<p><span style="font-size: small;"> In most of my CPU reviews I tend to focus on light overclocking - the low hanging fruit if you will. Over the past few years the focus has shifted from absolute performance to performance per watt. An overclock stops being so interesting if you have to incur a huge power penalty to get there. That's the reason I've put more emphasis on stock voltage overclocks in the past few years.</span></p> <p><span style="font-size: small;">The fact that I was able to get my Phenom II X6 1090T running at 3.8GHz with minimal effort was very impressive in my opinion. Remember that unlike Gulftown, AMD didn't get the benefit of a process shrink with the Phenom II X6. Six cores and nearly a billion transistors running at 3.8GHz with less than 10% more core voltage is awesome.</span></p> <p><span style="font-size: small;"><a target="_blank" href="http://www.anandtech.com/show/3676/phenom-ii-x6-4ghz-and-beyond-in-64bit-oses">Read more...</a><br /> </span></p>

A very smart man once told me that absolute performance doesn’t matter, it’s performance at a given price point that makes a product successful. While AMD hasn’t held the absolute performance crown for several years now, that doesn’t mean the company’s products haven’t been successful.

During the days of the original Phenom, AMD started the trend of offering more cores than Intel at a given price point. Intel had the Core 2 Duo, AMD responded with the triple core Phenom X3. As AMD’s products got more competitive, the more-for-less approach didn’t change. Today AMD will sell you three or four cores for the price of two from Intel.

In some situations, this works to AMD’s benefit. The Athlon II X3 and X4 deliver better performance in highly threaded applications than the Intel alternatives. While Intel has better performance per clock, you can’t argue with more cores/threads for applications that can use them.

When Intel announced its first 6-core desktop processor, the Core i7 980X at $999, we knew a cheaper AMD alternative was coming. Today we get that alternative, this is the Phenom II X6 based on AMD’s new Thuban core

It’s still a 45nm chip but thanks to architecture and process tweaks, the new Phenom II X6 still fits in the same power envelope as last year’s Phenom II X4 processors: 125W.

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<p><span style="font-size: small;">Uncharacteristically late for ASUS, the P55 based Maximus III Extreme was rolled out to retail a couple of weeks ago.</span></p> <p><span style="font-size: small;"> ASUS&rsquo;s &ldquo;M3E&rdquo; follows in the footsteps of boards from EVGA and MSI, by teaming up nViida&rsquo;s NF200 chipset to multiplex sixteen native PCIe lanes out to provide additional front-end bandwidth for multiple graphics cards and other devices. Overall, it&rsquo;s not a solution that ends up high on most enthusiast shortlists because Intel&rsquo;s X58 seems to be the logical choice and offers superlative performance in almost every way over the &ldquo;lesser&rdquo; P55.</span></p> <p><span style="font-size: small;">&nbsp;The truth is, we&rsquo;re waiting on vendors to send us their second-gen X58 motherboards so that we can provide you with a round-up of which makes the best buy. As we&rsquo;ve probably got a few weeks before things will be ready, a review of the M3E is the first of our time fillers, to be followed by a test of&nbsp;the mini-ITX&nbsp;ECS H55H-I next week. On top of that,&nbsp;Richard will be taking a look at Gigabyte's P55A-UD7 shortly, and we've also got AMD&nbsp;890FX boards&nbsp;to squeeze in somewhere. Put simply, lots to do but so little time.</span></p> <p><span style="font-size: small;"> Back to what's going down today, given the limited demand for $349 P55 boards, we&rsquo;ll spare you any further drivel and get down to the facts...</span></p> <p><a target="_blank" href="http://www.anandtech.com/show/3671/asus-m3e"><span style="font-size: small;">Read more</span></a></p> <p>&nbsp;</p>

If you are impressionable and susceptible to depression, then you should probably skip this review. A mainboard with unsuccessful design and extremely limited functionality has a very oppressive effect and may seriously influence your state of mind and overall mood.

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