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AMD FX-8150 Bulldozer CPU Review

CPU by leeghoofd @ 2011-10-12

It has been a while since AMD has revamped their CPU lineup. New Graphics Cards are introduced on a regular basis, though mostly their silicon motherboard processor variants are not. Mostly a brand new breed of CPUs goes hand in hand with the launch of a new CPU socket. And if the end user is really unlucky the RAM and CPU cooler need a swap too. It has been over 18 months since AMD introduced their hexacore Thuban CPU. So it was about time to give an answer to Intels SandyBridge lineup. Or why not even aim for Intels high end socket 1366 Gulftown lineup. With every new CPU release, speculations rule the various forums. How the design is gonna be, performance expectations, die size, TDP,.. you name it and has been dealt with on the tech sites. On the 12th of October AMDs new born CPU core baptized Zambezi, for the desktop PCs and for the servers Interlagos and Valencia will see the daylight. Let's open the press kit.

LN2 fun...

It's always a pleasure to work with an AMD CPU under liquid nitrogen. No Cold, nor Cold Boot Bug issues, just isolate well and get that CPU as cold as possible. Let's get the board prepped and mount SF3D's CPU pot.

Here's a shot of the press sytem up and running. We tested with the Corsair GTX2s for some basic fun and the more mainstream Dominator 1600CL8 kit to complete the OC charts. I limited myself to max 6.3Ghz for the charts as this is the highest CPU mulitplier selectable in the bios (31.5 X) HT clocking was not used to keep the data in line. This might be done in a seperate article to hunt down max clocks with the Bulldozer CPUs.

I think most slides speak for themselves. The faster you go the faster things run. Yet the efficiency remains crippled. Darn I couldn't beat my own personal best Pi 32 run on AMD (1090T), not even with 375Mhz more CPU speed.

Up to 6ghz no reason to go that cold. Only for Wprime and Cinebench I went down to -145°C. I used full pot ( -196°C) for the 6.3Ghz tests, just to be sure.

Bandwith scaling gets less once we pass 5.5Ghz.

Sadly this brand new FX CPU will not be benchers delight either. I benched 6.3Ghz all cores with the GTX480 card plugged in and didn't come even close to an older run with similar specs and a SB at 5.6Ghz (30K vs 34K).

Game tests were conducted at max 5.5Ghz, as I honestly don't see anyone reaching 6ghz daily without cold. Yet even at 1920 x 1080 high detail res they still scale with added CPU power.

Some fun snippits, when we have more time we will push the enveloppe and go HT clocking quest to reach them magical 8Ghz...

Comment from petervandamned @ 2011/10/12

Nice one

U did a great job bro !

Comment from Teemto @ 2011/10/12

Nice review. But still I feel FX is a dissapointment as I was hoping for it being at least on par with the 2600K.

Now the question arrizes:

What do I choose as next shrimp bench setup

:

1. Keep current Asus Z68 Gene-Z with
a) better 2600K (should ask for a Tones binning day

)
b) new 2700K (and hope for the best)

2. Wait for Sandy Bridge-E (most costly upgrade -> wife factor comes into play

)

3. Formula V + FX-8150 (hoping that with my new cascade I can manage a stable 5.5+GHz system). It'll look nice but will it be an improvement over my current 5.3 sandy bridge? I have my doubts...

Comment from leeghoofd @ 2011/10/12

I sold your CPU btw today... so something better is on the way if you are game...

For benching sorry but this CPU is only good at CPU-Z... it's a nice game platform or encoding machine as long as the apps support it. for benching plz look elsewhere...

Comment from larkin @ 2011/10/14

Nice NB overclocking test but you should really have high speed memory in there to see a bigger difference. I'm pretty sure PC1280 is a bottleneck at that OC.

Comment from leeghoofd @ 2011/10/14

thanks ir.

Yes i just wanted to have a reference. Sin at XS has tested NB scaling with 1866Mhz Link here : http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/...locking-Guide- ... His results were not scaling to much.

Too bad we need to go subzero to go over 2800Mhz... I hope retail silicon will be a better as steppings progress...

Comment from leeghoofd @ 2011/10/14

thanks sir.

Yes I just wanted to have a reference. Sin at XS has tested NB scaling with 1866Mhz Link here : http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/...locking-Guide- ... His results were not scaling to much.

Too bad we need to go subzero to go over 2800Mhz... I hope retail silicon will be a better as steppings progress...

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