AMD FX 8150 AM3+ Bulldozer Processor Review

I’m guessing as you read this, you feel very much the same as me, which is empty and disappointed, but I’m still wondering why. I mean, we all knew this would happen didn’t we? We know what AMD are like first and foremost, and we honestly believe that they couldn’t organize a piss-up in a brewery.

It seems that every launch sees AMD releasing an idea, but never the actual product and that generally follows 2-4 weeks later and that’s what our inside sources tell us about the FX-8150. We all assumed that AMD were releasing the AMD FX Bulldozer range of processors, and whilst they might complain that they have, they simply haven’t. If anything has been released, it’s the FX-8150 and nothing more, but even then, you can’t go and buy it, as no one has stock, so what’s the point?

Surely AMD would have been better off waiting two more weeks until stock was available, and then releasing something that people could actually buy. I’m sure AMD will hate me for this, but these comments need to be voiced and as you all know, we believe in providing honest and truthful articles, without any of the sugar coating. Now we can’t blame AMD completely, well we can but we won’t. Maybe some miscommunication happened throughout the whole world and the FX-8150 was wrongly tested or more importantly, what it was tested against.

We decided to give a broad spectrum of results from both AMD and Intel, and that would then help us identify exactly where the FX-8150 would be positioned and whilst a lot assumed it would rival the 2600k, it would be lucky to rival the 2500k in certain applications and even had trouble keeping up with the 1100t X6 Phenom II from AMD themselves.

Now the major problem with the FX-8150 that we can see, is that it has eight cores. Now a lot of you will be shouting at the screen, that the eight cores is what separates this processor from the rest, but obviously from the results, you can clearly see that it didn’t help really. Now we believe that this is all down to one thing, and that’s the lack of applications that can handle eight physical cores, but believe that as time goes on, more applications and games will take advantage of this new eight core technology, but how long that could be is anyones guess.

Moving onto the price at £204.97 and the area that AMD seem to have tied up and always on top of and we’re not talking about the price of the processor in its entirety as AMD’s pricing goes a lot further than that. When purchasing a flagship Intel Core i7 2600k, you’ll looking at a certain price of board, whereas the FX-8150 flagship processor will most likely see the board being cheaper by anywhere up to £100, and the processor also showing a price cut in comparison. So armed with an extra £150+ in your back pocket, it’s worth spending (in our eyes) the extra saved cash on upgrading your graphics or purchasing a Solid State Drive, which as you can appreciate, will give a much more noticeable difference than what you’d see between the FX-8150 and an i7 2600k, unless you fancy knowing how many extra minutes you can shave when using PI calculations.

AMD have always been focussed with gamers in mind, and that’s why, on that note, we will be bringing you another article that will see us looking at the gaming side of this processor in a lot more detail and pitting it directly against its rival; the i7 2600k as we get down to the nitty gritty, to see if the FX-8150 can be redeemed at all.