AMD FX-8150 Bulldozer 8 Core CPU

Benchmark Analysis

As you can see in almost all of the benchmarks the Bulldozer trades blows with the Intel i7 for first and second place. The Bulldozer pulls ahead of the i5 by a good margin in many benchmarks due to its frequency and additional cores. The multiprocessing power of the Bulldozer becomes especially clear when you look at applications like CineBench. Here we see a scene being rendered upon all 8 CPU’s. When rendered in multiprocessor mode the application gains 5.87X the speed of a single processor. When overclocked to 4.2GHz the CPU gains .85 points and renders even faster.

We are not seeing dominance over the i7 2600 so there is no new performance king. What we do see is a whole new level of multiprocessing capability and excellent scaling when the application can utilize all 8 cores. A good comparison is below:

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A CPU Intended for Overclocking and Gaming:

As if to drive the point home AMD will actually offer a SKU exclusive to the FX-8150 that comes bundled with watercooling by Asetek. This self contained system will allow overclockers to push their systems further and gamers to squeeze every last drop of power for their games.

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The inclusion of a retail bundle of waterclocking with a CPU is an impressive statement in and of itself. AMD must have significant confidence in this product and its capabilities to offer such a product. We have been assured that the bundle price will be reasonable, affordable, and offered at a price point lower than purchasing both separately.

Overclocking

No discussion about an AMD CPU would be complete if we didn’t try to fry the CPU and push it as far as it will go until the magic smoke is released. To be honest we didn’t want to smoke this processor just yet but we did push it as far as we were comfortable going using air cooling.

Overclocking Setup and Parameters:

We used a combination of entering raw data and parameters into the UFI Bios as well as utilizing the onboard ROG Connect through a laptop to control settings real time while in windows. As expected we obtained our best results using ROG to control voltages and frequencies within windows from the laptop. ROG is a most excellent feature and should be included on all boards. It simplifies the process and reduces to hours what would normally take days to do.

CPU-Z Screenshots:

3973 MHz	4063 MHz	4515 MHz
4632 MHz	4861 MHz	5015 MHz

As you can see the Bulldozer overclocks nicely considering this is all done using a standard HSF. We were able to achieve an overclock of 5100 MHz but not stable. This was accomplished with a VCore of 1.45v and VDDR of 1.75v. The highest stable overclock we were able to achieve was 4.6 GHz. AMD was able to get us a retail sample of their bundled water cooling solution but not in time for us to test and publish so expect an update to this article when we have had a chance to test the unit out.

So let’s wrap this up.

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