Official AMD FX Bulldozer review thread!

[Rollo]

Imagine the talk at the intel water cooler today.

Employee 1: Yawn. Hey, you hear those guys over at DMA or whatever released a cpu today?

Employee 2:Yawn. Don't do that! I was up late watching Robot Chicken, and I'm pretty tired! Anyway, new cpu huh? They catch up to the stuff we were doing last year yet?

Employee 1: Nope, but what's weird is they didn't catch up to what THEY were doing last year! What the f***?! If we tried that they'd probably audit our timesheets for the past three years!

Employee 2:No sh*t, wonder how those guys get away with this stuff?! They must all be in on it, the party probably starts at noon over there. Lucky bastards.

Employee 1: Oh well, better get back to it. See you Friday night for dinner, bring some of that bad ass 90 second IPA again, been a long week...

[Bah!]

Originally Posted by Sean_W

Let's not forget that it's a cheaper upgrade for current AMD owners and nothing really utilises it yet.

I get trying to find the silver lining in things, but come on. It's not really a cheaper upgrade, especially when you consider the price/performance ratio. And yes, nothing utilizes it yet, but nothing will. By the time stuff that utilizes this thing become mainstream there will a new generation of chips on the market.

This is a disaster for AMD. I haven't bought an AMD chip since my K7, and while I didn't believe it would be as amazing as everyone was saying it would be, I was at least hoping it would be a decent enough alternative to keep Intel in line.

[Viral]

There might be some silver linings here,

http://www.hardwareheaven.com/review...evolution.html

They tested with DDR3 1866MHz which is the max supported RAM speed for BD and under settings people actually game at the 8150 came out slightly better in all (3) games tested. H also reported the 8150 to be better than the 2600k for BF3 Beta.

Maybe faster memory is needed? And maybe we should be looking at actual settings people use. There could be some bottleneck that is making the results at low res a lot worse.

[Rollo]

Originally Posted by Viral

Maybe faster memory is needed? And maybe we should be looking at actual settings people use. There could be some bottleneck that is making the results at low res a lot worse.

Yes, like a "we've removed the GPU limitation from the benchmark so we could test the cpu" bottleneck?

If you crank up the res and aa you may be testing system performance under normal gaming conditions, but you've shifted the majority of the workload being tested to the GPU.

[Greedo]

[Viral]

Originally Posted by Rollo

Yes, like a "we've removed the GPU limitation from the benchmark so we could test the cpu" bottleneck?

If you crank up the res and aa you may be testing system performance under normal gaming conditions, but you've shifted the majority of the workload being tested to the GPU.

And? It's not like you're using different GPU's for each system. Real world is what matters. Sure, finding the CPU limitation may tell you what future games will do (arguable), but it misleads greatly as far as current games go. Sure, if under a more GPU limited situation all systems perform the same, that's somewhat useless information, although it should still be taken into account. If one system is slightly faster even at these high settings then this to me is far more important information than whatever system is faster than 1024x768 low settings.

[AthlonXP1800]

Originally Posted by shilk

May be a bit premature of me to say, but I'm ready as hell to jump ship and just get me an i5 2500K setup with a new mobo for $350.

I've been kind of waiting to see what we'd see with Bulldozer, and I'm seriously underwhelmed.

So do you guys think I should switch?

Listen to Hitler's advice.



If you want Sandy Bridge now, make sure you pick the motherboard that support 22nm Iny Bridge and PCI Express 3.0 ready.

http://event.asus.com/2011/mb/PCIe3_Ready/

[Rollo]

http://www.grapheine.com/bombaytv/de...d1a44884a.html

[Rollo]

Originally Posted by Viral

And? It's not like you're using different GPU's for each system. Real world is what matters. Sure, finding the CPU limitation may tell you what future games will do (arguable), but it misleads greatly as far as current games go. Sure, if under a more GPU limited situation all systems perform the same, that's somewhat useless information, although it should still be taken into account. If one system is slightly faster even at these high settings then this to me is far more important information than whatever system is faster than 1024x768 low settings.

A single 6950 isn't enough to test what the CPU limit is. If they were going to use high res and aa they should have used two (or three) 6970s or 580s to show which cpu gives the best scaling.

[AthlonXP1800]

Originally Posted by Viral

There might be some silver linings here,

http://www.hardwareheaven.com/review...evolution.html

They tested with DDR3 1866MHz which is the max supported RAM speed for BD and under settings people actually game at the 8150 came out slightly better in all (3) games tested. H also reported the 8150 to be better than the 2600k for BF3 Beta.

Maybe faster memory is needed? And maybe we should be looking at actual settings people use. There could be some bottleneck that is making the results at low res a lot worse.

Here no silver linings, looking at Tech Report review. FX 8150 and 8120 used faster DDR3-1866 9-10-0-27 2T crushed by Core i5 2500/2600 with slower DDR3-1333 8-8-8-20 2T.

[jcrox]

Do these reviews include the patch for the L2 cache bug?

I'm pulling the trigger on a new SB rig as my start up business can't afford to wait any longer for more computers but... I'm going to be really pissed off if 2 months from now some patch is released and these things turn into processing beasts.

[Peoples-Agent]

Originally Posted by jcrox

Do these reviews include the patch for the L2 cache bug?

I'm pulling the trigger on a new SB rig as my start up business can't afford to wait any longer for more computers but... I'm going to be really pissed off if 2 months from now some patch is released and these things turn into processing beasts.

That always happens with AMD as of late. It's "wait for this / that bios update / fix to sort out the problems" and it just never happens.