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FRONTPAGE AMD FX-8150 - Bulldozer - Processor Review

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How happy are you with AMD FX-8150 price/performance?


  • Total voters
    205
  • Poll closed .
I was disappointed about BD when the reviews officially came out on launch day but I still decided to get a new AMD combo so I could try something different from the Intel's offerings that I've been running over the past few years.

I'm also looking forward to Piledriver... might even take a shot at an 8170 in the hopes of possibly getting a better clocking sample...

I would go ahead and try it out. You might find that when overclocked you can make up for the 1100T's ipc advantage. I don't have much trouble running mine at 4.5/4.6GHz "daily" on air. Although some samples can be hot running... I see you are on water already. :thup:

If you don't like your 8150 you can always sell it off and go back to your 1100T :shrug:... at least you will then know first hand and your curiosity about BD will have been answered.
 
Been a month now working with BD on a CHIVE MB. Quite a few hiccups to contend with using the chipset on this MB and also the less then stellar cooling I've been having. Seems the BD is capable of overclocking, but for the life of me I can't keep it anywhere near the temps I want.

Since this is the last day of my replacement from newegg, I ordered a replacement.

We'll see if this is any different.

-Rodger
 
What are you doing to cool it? They run pretty warm no matter what individual chip you have. On top of that, support with the CIVE is flaky at best. It would probably be a better setup for you if you sold the CIVE and got a CVF (or some other 990FX board that's not the Gigabyte 990FXA-UD7) to replace it.
 
What are you doing to cool it? They run pretty warm no matter what individual chip you have. On top of that, support with the CIVE is flaky at best. It would probably be a better setup for you if you sold the CIVE and got a CVF (or some other 990FX board that's not the Gigabyte 990FXA-UD7) to replace it.
Maybe so. I've had 3 different water coolers on it so far. 1st was Antec Kuhler 920 (pump quit), then Corsair H60 (too small), now Corsair H80, still runs too hot at anything over 4Ghz or so with Prime95 torture test. I don't think the CHIVE could really contribute to too high temps though, just limit stability and OC'ing to BD's full potential.

I use Arctic Silver 5 and have (as always) been very careful to use just enough to almost reach the edges of the CPU when the cooling device is installed. On each of these coolers I'm seeing socket temps reach up to 80C. and core temps hit 70C. under Prime95 and stable OC @ 4.678GHz. So, if it's just the way the BD does things tempwise or maybe a bad chip, or even a less then good enough cooler I'm not sure. But I was sure that this was my last day to exchange the CPU, so had to get that done.

I am looking at possibly buying a new MB, but I've been hearing rumors that that may be some support chip changes coming to help this BD work better, so I will most likely wait a bit and see if this is true or not before upgrading.

-Rodger
 
I would stick with your board for daily overclocking needs. Support is poor on it for extreme oc, can't disable cores, and I had trouble disabling throttling on the cive, but other than that I think its fine for daily use on bd I guess. mainly, unless there are other upgrades/features you want specifically, I don't think the cost of a new mobo is worth it for you.

there wont be any updates that change bd perdormance.
 
My point about the board sort-of applies to socket temp, which may be inaccurate. I'd trust Coretemp personally. That doesn't sound too bad for that overclock under Prime load with that kind of cooler. I was hitting core temperatures of ~65°C with 1.41V at 4.76GHz on a full water loop (Swiftech MCR320, MCP35x, EK Supreme HF Cu). I'm just saying don't expect much to change with a new chip.

EDIT - IMOG has tried the combo, if he says the CIVE is good for daily use, then that's a good enough endorsement for me. :thup:
 
Yeah, wouldn't disagree with either of you. Just thought I'd like to see if temps would be lower with a different BD. On a side note, I also have a Delta "turbine rocket jet-drive" fan coming in today to see what 6000 RPM, 230 C.F.M. and 24 mm/h20 static pressure will do to my radiator (and possibly cooling).

-Rodger
 
felt I should clarify my thoughts. I have badmouthed bulldozer on the cive, but as far as I remember, my issues would only effect extreme on dice/ln2 benching really. still valid strikes on a board of this caliber and disappointing as a proper BIOS would fix what issues do exist. as is those issues forced me to buy a cvf, costing me a couple hundred bucks. that's why I have made some grumpy cive comments in the past.
 
felt I should clarify my thoughts. I have badmouthed bulldozer on the cive, but as far as I remember, my issues would only effect extreme on dice/ln2 benching really. still valid strikes on a board of this caliber and disappointing as a proper BIOS would fix what issues do exist. as is those issues forced me to buy a cvf, costing me a couple hundred bucks. that's why I have made some grumpy cive comments in the past.
The whole BD thing and all that's related to it is not so good for anyone. I just wish AMD would have thought-through their choices a bit more before committing to a few of them. I'm still a bit shocked my memory timings/transfer rates are worse then on the 1090T and with the high current/temps this chip exhibits, I know things are just not right on the insides for minimal increase in some areas over the 1090T.

I guess since I just finished building a i5-2500K setup, I'm a little miffed to see what is possible with better thought-through designing.

-Rodger
 
Installed the Delta QFR1212GHE-PWM 120mm Case Fan -- WOW!

The reviews I read are right-on about jet turbine sounds. One of my companies builds R/C flying wings and we use all kinds of electric power plants, turbines being one of them and this muffin fan is about as close to a turbine sound I ever heard in ANY fan of this type.

This fan so far seems to be the ticket to get temps down on this CPU. I done a little testing so far, and I can see a 10C. drop in socket temps and about 5 C. drop in core temps (under Prime95 torture test) on my BD. The biggest things though, is running prime95 for over 30 minutes the CPU didn't clockdown at all. Before installing this fan, it was clocking down after about the first 5 minutes or so, and then every couple of minutes for maybe 15 seconds at a time.

More testing will be done over the weekend, so I'll maybe start a new thread then. The new CPU will be in today as well, so after I test this one enough to get hard numbers, I'll install the new one and test it as well for comparison.

I would like to see 5Ghz stable, but I still don't hold too high a hope for that.

BTW-- I've set a custom profile in AI Suite II's "Fan Xpert" to quite this thing down when high performance cooling isn't necessary. Set the curve so normal workloads don't raise the fan above idle (1950 RPM), so it about the same noise level as it was with the 2 H80 stock fans on the radiator, with BIOS fans speeds set to NORMAL.

-Rodger
 
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Soo, the office BD has been an absolute beast so far. This is hands down the best chip for the money when it comes to building a budget VM server.
 
The FX-8150 is a lot of fun to play with, especially if you go cold. It depends on what you do with it as to whether it will disappoint you. If your plan is to run standard HWBot-style benchmarks on ambient cooling and compare it to your 1100T, I'd sell the thing. If you want to see how it works with productivity and the like (video/audio editing and encoding, photo manipulation, compression...things like that) as well as freeze it just to see how far you can go...then you won't be disappointed. :)

A Plus big 1:ty:
 
I bet that cost a pretty penny in its day. Bet the BD server didn't even approach that. Glad you're happy with it. :)
 
This chip is Junk and my heart is broken!

Sending my fx back.
It is a black screen machine.
Buying any x6 Phenom2's I can find.
The secret is out this chip is junk.
The industry needs to come clean-
fx is not ready for prime time.
Breaks my heart.
 
Well, that sounds like a hardware problem. You can complain about floating point performance with plenty of justification, but 'black screen machine' indicates a problem with the system. They function just fine in my and many others' experience. They just don't necessarily function as strongly as expected.
 
^^^ +1

The black screens are not a product of your FX processor. Somethkn else is wrong. You may have gotten a bad chip. But not every FX processor is a black screen machine.
 
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