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AMD FX "Bulldozer" review

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Verdict

Unable to compete on speed and price, which means one thing - Intel still rules the roost

Review Date: 12 Oct 2011

Reviewed By: Mike Jennings

Price when reviewed: (£195 inc VAT)

Overall Rating

On paper, these new cores, running at these high speeds, look like they might just be capable of challenging Intel's dominance.

To find out, we plugged the top-of-the-range FX-8150 into our test rig – an Asus Crosshair V Formula motherboard, AMD Radeon HD 6870 graphics card, 4GB of RAM and a 500GB Samsung Spinpoint F3 hard disk – and launched our real-world application benchmarks.

The system achieved an overall score of 0.84. That's the kind of performance we'd expect from a low-end Core i5 chip. A recent PC from Advent with a 2.9GHz Intel Core i5-2310 returned the same 0.84 score in our benchmark, with a stock-speed Core i7-2600 serving as the benchmark at 1.

In our test rig, the idle and maximum power draws hit 91W and 224W, which is nothing out of the ordinary. And the FX chip is certainly cool enough: when idling beneath our Zalman CNPS7X cooler it hit just 22 degrees, rising to 55 degrees when stressed with Prime95.

Theoretically, that suggests AMD's new chips might have plenty of scope for overclocking, but in our tests we were only able to get the system up to 4.2GHz: not a big enough leap to worry Intel.

That isn’t the end of the bad news. AMD used to be known as the budget choice but the FX-8150 offers poor value compared to Intel. This top-end CPU will sell for £195 inc VAT, £35 more than the faster Core i5-2500K. The situation seemingly improves lower down the range, with the FX-4100 coming in at just £95 inc VAT but, as we haven’t the opportunity to test it yet, we’ll reserve judgement.

AMD made us wait for Bulldozer, but on the evidence of this first outing we can't say it's been worth it. It's not as fast as its direct rivals, yet will cost you more. When it comes to desktop processors, Intel still holds all the cards.

Author: Mike Jennings

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Comments

User comments

bulldozer

kool so when do they hit the shops.......any links?
thanks....

By terranova on 12 Oct 2011

I suspect that drivers may increase the performance considerably.

Aria are taking pre-orders that I've spotted.

By skarlock on 12 Oct 2011

bulldozer

thanks i see novatech has the now too.......wooohooo

By terranova on 12 Oct 2011

Interesting

They may not beat Intel on speed and price but they are still moving in the right direction .I have one question: How much is the L1 cache?

By DeanC on 12 Oct 2011

No graphics?

These chips have no graphics processors? If this is so, AMD are throwing away their one major advantage over Intel. "As good as a mid-range Intel model in general processing PLUS a significant lead in graphics performance" would be compelling as a better balanced system.
I had hoped AMD were going down a radical modular approach so they could spin different combinations of integer, floating-point and graphics cores to suit different markets. But this actually seems pretty conservative in design.

By JohnAHind on 13 Oct 2011

Intel leaves AMD in the rear view mirror!

What a shame. I've been hoping for an AMD comeback for ages. Clearly this isn't it. I just hope that if AMD eventually go under somebody buys what's left of ATI and keeps it going. I love their graphics cards for folding.

Shane
http://diekittymaschine.blogspot.com/

By ashane on 14 Oct 2011

4GB of RAM in the test rig? That is pathetic. You may think that 4GB is enough for almost all benchmarks, but it is not. Even if only 2GB is constantly in use, there are often times where the memory usage peaks at a much higher value. A test rig for desktop CPUs should have 16GB RAM.

By dan22 on 26 Oct 2011

@dan22

16GB wouldn't have made any difference to the scores Dan. Bulldozer is pathetic - it has been a disaster from the moment of its inception. At one point, AMD overstated the number of transistors, but then, they have been outsourcing their chip production to themselves as the highest bidder for some time. The company is from a Python sketch, and the benchmark results throughout development were (and still are) astoundingly embarrassing. Not to say that their design ideas won't come good eventually, but that depends on AMD selling enough of these terrible chips to stay in business whilst Intel casually make incremental improvements that still outperform AMD, and laugh all the way to the bank.

By baldmosher on 26 Apr 2012

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