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AMD FX6100 Reviewed!

Soldato
Joined
5 Mar 2006
Posts
3,975
Location
Nottingham
Righty, I've had my FX6100 about a week now so I thought that, given that pretty much no-one anywhere on the 'net has done one, I'd give it a bit of a review.

I'll start by saying that if you want a high powered gaming machine with the best possible cpu then you should stop reading and click here. The FX can't compete with high end Intel stuff and I knew that when I bought it.

Price

I got mine when it was on offer from OcUk which, combined with the AMD cashback deal, put it at £92.99. With it's current price and the cashback it's £109.99. This puts it within a similar price bracket as the i3-2120, less than OcUk's single remaining Phenom x6 offering and almost half the cost of the 2500k.

First Impressions


img2012021500099.jpg


The box is quite smart and everything's well packaged. The stock cooler's got a nice layer of thermal compound on the bottom and is very solid and chunky. The fan isn't overly loud and does seem to shift a decent amount of air for it's size. I can't comment on the stock cooler's performance as my chip went straight under water.

When first booted in a Gigabyte 990FXA-UD3 AMD 990X board paired with 8Gb Kingston HyperX 1600 RAM and a HD6950 it all loaded up first time with no issues. The ram needed a quick bios tweak to get it running at it's full speed but that was it. At stock it only pulled 1.232v.

tempsv.jpg


Even though it's not the best money can buy from the first use it certainly felt faster than my Q6600 I was previously using and as those of you who have read my build log will know, it was anywhere between 30-200% faster depending on the application.

Performance

Time for some actual figures! All my comparisons have been dragged from anandtech's benchmark comparison tool as it seems to get passed around on the forums quite a bit. I've not been able to go to town and match every single benchmark they did as I didn't want to pay for software but I've done my best to download all the free stuff (I've used older versions to match the benchmarks) and used some software I already had.
I've used the i3-2120 as this is currently the FX6100's closest competition in terms of price. I've also included the 2500k as that's what everyone else has got :p

I've also included the FX at 4.8 (240x20) for a comparison of what it's capable of when pushed a bit. We'll get on to overclocking in more detail later.

First of all Cinebench and Bulldozer's arch enemy - Single Threaded Performance -

cinebenchb.jpg


Beaten in to a bloody pulp by the i3 and the i5's just in a completely different league. Even overclocked it can't match a stock i3.

Multi-Threaded -

cinebenchmulti.jpg


That's a bit better! A good lead over the i3 and not a million miles from the i5 when overclocked. Bulldozer does seem to love heavly threaded workloads.

Now for one of my most used pieces of software, Photoshop. I had to drop back down to CS4 to match the Intel benchmarks, it's even faster in CS5. This is time in seconds so lower is better. As I had to time it myself with a stopwatch I ran it 5 times, discarding the highest and lowest and averaging the remaining 3 times just to be as fair as possible.

retouch.jpg


Another win over the i3, still some way from the 2500k though.

Time for some more threaded work - encoding benchmarks. This is where Bulldozer really has a chance to shine.

1stpass.jpg


The i3 with only 2 cores doesn't stand a chance here - the FX even managing to match a stock 2500k.

2ndpass.jpg


Again almost matching an i5 and leaving the dual core i3 for dead yet again.

And now the only game that I own that there was also a benchmark for - Dawn of War 2. Used the same settings as the benchmarks but I don't know what level they used so I used Fraps to get average FPS on the performance test tool.

dow2e.jpg


Worse than an i3 at stock but pulls well ahead once overclocked.

As you can see from the above tests it really is shocking at single threaded applications but gains a distinct advantage over it's competitors once you start using more threads. An overclock really helps too, something that's not really possible on an i3.

Overclocking

I've got mine sat at 4.8 (240x20) at the moment and it's pulling 1.425v. It's a good, stable, overclock and as you can see from the performance tests it gives a good boost over stock speeds. It's the easiest chip I've ever had the pleasure to work with - you can pretty much just leave everything else stock and it's good for up to 4.6GHz before you need to change anything. Just increasing the multi will easily get you up to 4.8. And if you're not afraid of voltage and have a good cooling setup then this is possible -

5ghzb.jpg


It does pull a fair voltage when it's under load though, I had a tough time keeping temps under 60c!

It's also worth nothing that it scales much better if you raise the bus and not just the multiplier. Here's a quick Cinebench 11 benchmark to show the difference -

cinebenchx.jpg


Conculsion

Is it a top gaming chip? No.
Is it a top encoding/workhorse chip? No.
Is it good on a budget? Yes.

Single threaded performance aside (because it's truely awful!) in most other cases it utterly destroys its nearest rival, the i3-2120. If you give it a little push it's not a million miles from the 2500k in modern applications. It'd be pretty naff if you tried to team it up with an SLI or Crossfire rig but I've not noticed any bottlenecking at 1920x1200 as most of the load gets lumped on the GPU. For ~£100 it's quite a good little chip.

The only issue is that the platform wouldn't give you the option to upgrade to a much more powerful cpu if you got bored (ie, i3>i5) and Piledriver's probably still not going to be anywhere near IvyBridge when it comes out.
 
why did you choose to use the worse cinebench for the FX architecture, R10 outright hates it with passion, it doesn't do 'that' badly in R11.5 and in the more modern version it even claws back some ground in single-threaded work.

so far have found my 8120 very good for games, nothing like the 'horror' show the majority of people think it is, there can be boosts in games by setting core affinity using AMD overdrive as well, supreme commander is a big example I have noticed where performance is much much smoother at 4C/4T than 4C/8T.

did you also notice the peculiar more than linear scaling as frequency increases? noticed when I have been messing around, as frequency increases so seemingly does instructions/cycle, think that is entirely down to the L2/L3 cache.

but for the price they are decent performers, don't understand how anyone can doubt it? this one (8120) was ~£130 and it goes as high as 4.9GHZ on this 'non-overclocker' motherboard. :confused:
 
a phenom II 1090t/1100t @ 4ghz would out performance a fx6100 @ 4.5-4.6ghz in most things & a phenom II 1090t/1100t @ 4ghz is on pair with a fx8150 @ 4.6ghz~ in most things

thats how crap BD is
 
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yes its a bad chip yes it can be beaten... but its a 100 quid six core and you can run it on cheaper boards? plus try finding phenom 2 six cores or even the older quads new in stock, at good prices. i think these cpus will become the new cheaper machine option and lets face it its not going to run bad.
 
Not too bad for a £93 CPU especially one with an unlocked multiplier. Surprised it is quicker than my Core i3 2100 at Photoshop. The Phenom II X6 1090T didn't really go below £125 IIRC. The Phenom II X6 1045T could be had for around £104 excluding postage until recently,but only one retailer sells it,with varying availability.
 
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why did you choose to use the worse cinebench for the FX architecture, R10 outright hates it with passion, it doesn't do 'that' badly in R11.5 and in the more modern version it even claws back some ground in single-threaded work.

I didn't choose it as such, it was used because that's what the review site I got my i3 and i5 results from were using and I needed it to be a fair comparison. I'll happily run it through Cinebench 11 if someone can find results of the i3 and i5 from the same source :)

a phenom II 1090t/1100t @ 4ghz would out performance a fx6100 @ 4.5-4.6ghz in most things & a phenom II 1090t/1100t @ 4ghz is on pair with a fx8150 @ 4.6ghz~ in most things

thats how crap BD is

Are you basing that on known statistics or just jumping on the 'I don't care how cheap it is, BD's crap yo' bandwagon? Because from what I can see the PII 1100 trades blows with the i3-2120 meaning it's about on par with the FX6100.
 
Are you basing that on known statistics or just jumping on the 'I don't care how cheap it is, BD's crap yo' bandwagon? Because from what I can see the PII 1100 trades blows with the i3-2120 meaning it's about on par with the FX6100.
i've had a 8150 and a 1090t which i still got.

a 8150 needs to be at least 4.6ghz~ to be on pair with a 1090t/1100t at 4ghz?

i've posted benchmarks showing this awhile back
 
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phenom II 1090t with stock cpu nb
3dmark11
... ....

cinebench115
..... ....

heaven x11
.... .....

dvdfab


phenom II 1090t with 2600mhz cpu nb

3dmark11
..... .....

metro2033
..... .......

8150 results
heaven x11


metro2033


dvdfab


cinebench115


3dmark11



@ 4ghz
cpu-nb @ 2600mhz





4.5ghz





these are my own results.

also it was bottlenecking my gpus
 
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thanks, great review. i have purchased a fx4100 black edition chip due to having free mobo that supports it. will see how she goes.

my previous system which i sold was a i5 2500k system. obviously this will not touch it but be interesting to see how bad it is.

not sure what o/c i can do with stock cooler.
 
thanks, great review. i have purchased a fx4100 black edition chip due to having free mobo that supports it. will see how she goes.

my previous system which i sold was a i5 2500k system. obviously this will not touch it but be interesting to see how bad it is.

not sure what o/c i can do with stock cooler.
it'll be a big downgrade tbh

why u sold your i5 2500k system?
 
not sure what o/c i can do with stock cooler.

Between 4.2GHZ to 4.6GHZ from what I gather. There are a few threads on overclock.net which are worth checking too:

http://www.overclock.net/f/10/amd-cpus

An OcUK member managed to get a decent overclock on one using a cheap motherboard:

http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18354907

Overclocked power consumption and temperatures don't seem too bad unlike the higher end FX models. Maximum operating temperature is also rated at 70C too.
 
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it'll be a big downgrade tbh

why u sold your i5 2500k system?

purely down to financial problems and clearing a credit card. only 1 left now. :D

Between 4.2GHZ to 4.6GHZ from what I gather. There are a few threads on overclock.net which are worth checking too:

http://www.overclock.net/f/10/amd-cpus

An OcUK member managed to get a decent overclock on one using a cheap motherboard:

http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18354907

Overclocked power consumption and temperatures don't seem too bad unlike the higher end FX models. Maximum operating temperature is also rated at 70C too.

many thanks. will check that out. have heard that 4.2 ghz on stock is easily achieved but above that would need after market one and upping the v.cores which i have very little practice and experience doing.

my motherboard is a 970A-D3 gigabyte.

built the rig last night will test over weekend.
 
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