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Does anyone actually own a Bulldozer 8 core?

Secret_Window

Secret_Window

Secret_Window

Soldato
Joined
10 Aug 2006
Posts
5,207
Not seen many people with it listed in their SIG specs and so thought this would be an interesting opportunity to ask those who bought AMD's Bulldozer 8 core cpu and how they are finding it.

I am curious about how they are finding their performance in apps and games and also further insight to why the opted for it over Intel's offerings.


:)





(This is not a troll post - I am genuinely interested in Bulldozer and was considering one to play with.)
 
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Hey, dont own a bulldozer myselt but ppl I know do and nearly all of them wish they went intel upon buying it. They are amd fan boys so kinda went along with the 8 core thing but made little difference in games lol.
 
Its not being beaten by 2500 across the board. Its trading blows. It even wins some against the hyperthreaded 2600.

Yes its not brilliant, no its not a total disaster for someone not overclocking.
 
Also Microsoft are releasing a new windows 7 scheduler for Bulldozer that'll help performance some, how much I don't know..
 
Trunks9486 said:
Its not being beaten by 2500 across the board. Its trading blows. It even wins some against the hyperthreaded 2600.

Yes its not brilliant, no its not a total disaster for someone not overclocking.
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^ This.

I have an 8150 as I have always gone AMD, but mainly because I already bought my mobo before BD was released :P

Got it overclocked to 4.4Ghz and pretty pleased with it. Although I have no benchmarks for comparison with my old cpu, it scores 7.3 in Cinebench.

An interesting thing is there is a 20% increase in performance in Cinebench (4 thread) using every other core (0,2,4,6) rather than the first 4 (0,1,2,3)!

As hominid said Microsoft & AMD are working on a patch to do just this.
 
also must admit one received a 8120 this morning, got a chance to take out X6 and see what is what, not sure what all the doom and gloom is about, seems to run without issue, feels snappier than my 1055T did even when it was clocked at 4.0GHZ, haven't had a chance to do anything with clocks but it runs stable at 8150 speeds at lowered voltage without trouble, not quite sure why the voltage is that high to start with...:confused:

got a surprisingly decent sum of cash for my old socket 939 ASUS board, never knew they went for a reasonable amount so decided to trade my 1055T for a 8120, just too see what they are like, plus planning on selling that so will effectively be free, in-fact better than free so thought what the hell...:rolleyes:

will see what is what when I get some spare time, also need a new piece of tubing for water-cooling since managed to split a pipe when adding something to the loop! must confess looking forward to a bit of a tinker!
 
Got one FX8120 at work, it's OK, better than the 2700K for our usage but that is exceptional. We run a number of PII X6 boxes that will be replaced eventually but not with FX8xxx CPUs (due motherboards) or SB-E (due to price), maybe the BD successor though.
 
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the reports on them being terrible are far too blown out of proportion, people constantly say they get 'beat' by the 2500K and 2600K at everything, when in-fact it trades blows with the Sandy Bridge processors much better than the X6 ever did, put it simply it beats Intel in more benchmarks than K10.5 ever did and folk are still calling it terrible cause of its dodgy single core performance, which can be remedied to an extent by telling the system to run a thread on each module rather than each core, going to do some comparisons in the near future between stock settings and 'optimal' settings in games, do very much expect to see some improvements from the lack of sharing but in more or less all other tasks the multi-cored approach yields optimal results.
 
Yeah I saw the benchies and thought that myself. It gets a lot of flak, but really it isn't that bad. Although, I can see why some AMD users might not feel the need to go with it as the gain wasn't as big over the X6 as some may have hoped. Certainly though, 8 cores good or bad, has some future proofing to it. Raw speed isn't necessarily as good as some of the Intel quads, but as more apps become tweaked to take advantage of more cores, there I reckon we may start to see Bulldozer come to life more - wouldn't that be a surprise?

Myself though, I wanted one for video editing and rendering large video files - which Bulldozer has always been something I've wanted to use and play with.

Gaming wise, I do remember seeing a Deus Ex:HR bench somewhere where it was showing higher fps with the Bulldozer 8 core and Phenom 6 core over Sandy Bridge quads, which was interesting.
 
I do wish that guy would practice more before he records these videos, he comes across as abit of a tool TBH.

Constantly repeating the same things, stumbling over his words, slipping into Essex boy 'Geezer Speak', etc,etc.

He just comes across as very amateurish.
 
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Cooper said:
I do wish that guy would practice more before he records these videos, he comes across as abit of a tool TBH.

Constantly repeating the same things, stumbling over his words, slipping into Essex boy 'Geezer Speak', etc,etc.

He just comes across as very amateurish.
Click to expand...

I think the same, but it makes me like him in a way.
 
Gashman said:
the reports on them being terrible are far too blown out of proportion, people constantly say they get 'beat' by the 2500K and 2600K at everything, when in-fact it trades blows with the Sandy Bridge processors much better than the X6 ever did
Click to expand...

It also loses to Phenom X4 in some tests, so the question is simply why pay more for less? the 2500K is cheaper and performs consistently faster across the board. Bulldozer performance varies wildly between mediocre to great and is merely average in most cases.

I don't really buy into the "it trades blows with a 2600K in these 5 apps so that makes it as good" argument, that's just being selective and ignoring the majority of cases where it gets made to look ordinary even by Phenoms standards.

I haven't even mentioned Bulldozer's poor power consumption. :p
 
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power consumption is acceptable, not quite sure how anyone can mention that as a 'serious' problem, its only when one takes the frequency rather high that the power consumption starts to become an issue, otherwise its similar to the X6 but typically better, running this one at 8150 speeds and below stock voltage so it should be consuming reasonable amount less than the 1055T it replaces.

gaming benchmarks, X6 typically wins, though will be interested in testing that with one thread to one module rather than sharing for gaming performance, so that could be considered partially a hardware problem and partially a software problem, no denying the software part of it either. use the processor correctly and the whole 'sharing and module' business can be managed to an extent, was never going to be the architectures strong point.

lightly threaded workloads it tends to fair no better or slightly worse than the previous generation, but start chucking more threads at them and it'll pull away from the X4 and X6, sometimes by a sizeable margin. so the same repeated claim of 'majority' of times is wholly incorrect, look at the reviews on the net, find it staggering that for a forum that is so anal about benchmarks it seems so difficult to view examples of Bulldozer doing well rather than bad, all it ever comes down to is gaming performance, which I have noticed absolutely no negative impact in the slightest so far, not a single bit.

heck even in the 'Anandtech' review, which is so revered somewhat on this forum, in most things other than gaming and single-threaded benchmarks Bulldozer is either even or beats the 1100T, all the reviews I have seen show the same trend, only in the applications that are very light on the thread count does it get beaten by previous generation, but even then like one mentioned above, part hardware, part software problem. ;)
 
Cooper said:
I do wish that guy would practice more before he records these videos, he comes across as abit of a tool TBH.

Constantly repeating the same things, stumbling over his words, slipping into Essex boy 'Geezer Speak', etc,etc.

He just comes across as very amateurish.
Click to expand...

I personally like his vids. He does ramble on a bit... But still top bloke.
 
I have an 8150 and am perfectly pleased with it! - I'm not really a gamer, I tend to use my PC for video editing and working in Visual Studio 2010. Although it doesn't beat intel in benchmarks, it still seems to perform perfectly in real life. I have overclocked mine to 4.0GHz but I plan to overclock a lot more once I get a new cooler (Looking at an Antec Kuhler H2O 620)

Overall, I'm perfectly happy with my Bulldozer.
 
These forums are so up Intel and at end off day who gives a ****. Benchmarks thats what life is all about, the majority of ordinary every day people wont even notice the differance to an Intel or the Bulldozer when the chips are down but when you can stand against the wall and say my 2500k is the best what are you pis*ing with, life as we know it has ended, omg god get a life.

We make choices based on many factors and not all off them are "what is the best" real life things like budget and what is this PC going to be used for etc seem to be more important than 35sec on rendering or 2.67fps on Sims lol.

Reading this thread went from who owns to who is owned which is very typical of this place,its like looking out the window at who has the biggest car,house,dog,child haha look at me I own a benchmark daddy.
 
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