If you’re unsure as to what Bulldozer and the FX range or processors is all about, then we suggest you take a look at our article explaining the ins and outs of it. If you are aware of what Bulldozer and the FX range is all about, we still suggest that you take a look as some vital key information is listed, including something that you may have missed. The article focusses on the complete range of processors in the line-up and clearly goes into detail about the technology that makes it up and what simply makes it tick.
On top of all of this, we also made it clear that the facts needed to be seen and whilst a lot of consumers were expecting a lot, most were let down in terms of the usual suspect of benchmarks as seen in our FX 8150 Bulldozer review. So why are we here again, revisiting something that was actually; a complete let-down? Simple, we want to show you more, and where it matters the most, well at least one aspect of it.
Simply put, their are two main aspects that people really wanted to see with Bulldozer and that is firstly how well it overclocks and secondly, how it performs in some extreme games. While we thought, showing these individually would be a fantastic look at how this compares to the equivalent flagship Intel i7 2600k processor, we were more interested in seeing how well it performs in games, whilst overclocked. We already know that the i7 2600k beats the FX-8150 hands down in general workload tests and a bit of light gaming, but its time to go no holds barred and see what they both can really do in terms of performance, and we have to also remember that the FX-8150 is a fair bit cheaper to, so just keep that in mind when comparing the two rivals.
Getting started, there isn’t much point going over the architecture again and what Bulldozer was meant to be about, and instead will see us jumping straight in to the tests to see if the FX-8150 can redeem itself in any way.
Would of been nice to see the Phenom II 6X 1100T in the review as well
That is just awesome!
awesome article!
just proves the point that modern games rely heavily on a good GPU rather than an awesome processor once the CPU bottleneck is overcome.
So considering BD is cheaper than a 2600K and so are the decent crossfire/SLI motherboards, maybe BD is, after all, a very good option for gamers as the money saved can go towards a faster GPU, hence better gaming performance!
If you read ANY other gaming performance review of the BD, you will see how terrible this tripe is.
I have no problem with the BD chip, but this "review" is dishonest. The numbers don't correspond with the same games reviewed on ANY other site. I wonder what resolutions were used.
dishonest in what way? We tested the games three times on each system to give the fairest results possible.
We used 1920×1080 on all of our tests, apart from the likes of 3DMark 11 where it has a pre-defined preset.
Settings vary between each game, but we aim to use the maximum settings where possible whilst maintaining a suitable frame-rate. With the likes of Metro 2033, max settings will give you 20FPS ish, which isn't suitable, so instead we use high settings opposed to very high to give that balance between performance and quality.
I am suprised at the 8150's performance considering other websites benchmarks, Although it seems eteknix is a more honest site and these results have just made me want to order a fx 8170.
Thanks, in other general benchmarks the FX does get outperformed by the i7 2600k but in gaming, they rely more on the GPU than the CPU and this is what is shown here.
The Tech Report did an article called "further overclocked" where they used AMD's new water-cooling setup(looks similar to the H70). When comparing the FX-8150 to the i7-2600k, the FX actually out performed the i7 in some areas.
"turning up the clock frequency allows the FX-8150 to put up some really nice numbers, tying or beating a Core i7-2600K overclocked to 4.5GHz in several cases."
When it comes to CrossFire/SLI, only Tweaktown and AlienBabelTech tested the FX8150 in that scenario. Its not looking pretty as it still shows AMD bottlenecking CrossFire/SLI setups.
Why overclock the CPUs? Why not test both using stock settings?
Why weren’t the power consumption and temperature numbers included? At 4.6Ghz, the FX’s power usage is outrageous. In the previous review it was idling at 209W and 439W at full load. That should be included, along with the Core i7-2600k’s numbers, which I know is no where close to that. You even wrote:
“Having a look at the power, we can see that at idle we have a fairly reasonable chip on our hands which shouldn’t run up huge electricity bills, unless of course you overclock where we see some massive hikes in power usage at both idle and especially at load.”
So how does it receive a “Gold” award, when the full review of the FX-8150 did not garner any award?