Does anyone actually own a Bulldozer 8 core?

[FallshirmjAEger]

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.

lol I had activex filtering enabled so I IE9 blocked the vid, but as soon as I read your post, I knew who you were on about

To answer OP's question: yes, but they are all safely locked up. (Serious though, I have read comments from one or two on here)

 

[sunama]

...I tend to use my PC for video editing and working in Visual Studio 2010.

How does it perform in Visual Studio. Can you give more info?
I use Resharper and constantly get stuttering and slowdowns on my Core2Duo, while VS/Resharper validates any changes I make to source code.

I'm wondering if 6 extra threads would solve this issue.

 

[camerongray]

How does it perform in Visual Studio. Can you give more info?
I use Resharper and constantly get stuttering and slowdowns on my Core2Duo, while VS/Resharper validates any changes I make to source code.

I'm wondering if 6 extra threads would solve this issue.

I've not used resharper but when dealing with Windows Phone 7 C# development under Visual Studio 2010 Professional I never experience any slowdowns or stuttering. As far as the 6 extra threads, that really depends on whether Resharper will use the extra cores while refactoring or not.

 

[Gashman]

after another few days of using this 'terrible' chip, 100% think everything is blown out of proportion with regards to their performance, its not just 'good' but would go as far as saying so far its excellent in the performance department, totally does feel faster than my 1055T without a shadow of doubt.

me experiments with tweaking have came to a slight end however, something that can be fixed mind, my motherboard it turns out has no heat sink or anything on the voltage regulators around the CPU socket, at the moment at 3.6GHZ (1.15V) they are sitting rather toasty, so going to fashion some sort of cooler for them in the very near future, get temperatures down to something I am comfortable with and continue messing around, had it up-to 4.6 mind (1.45V) with no issues to speak of, power supply is holding up perfectly well also.

going to have a fiddle around with voltages see if one can get that frequency with slightly lower voltages, every little helps! hopefully in a week or two might get a chance to have a proper mess around and get some benchmarks on the table, quite interested in tweaking in the gaming performance side of things.

 

[Lordgrayone]

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.

+1

Intel users need the extra ooompphh to make up for the lack of skill

I`ve got my coat....i`ll see myself out

 

[chaotic_uk]

+1

Intel users need the extra ooompphh to make up for the lack of skill

I`ve got my coat....i`ll see myself out

you owe me a keyboard , i was just drinking a coffee

 

[ntg]

I got a 8120. Mainly because I had an amd chip and bought a new mobo, then the chip died and had to buy a new cpu, so could only go AMD. Can't comment on performance as I haven't done anything much with it yet.

I understand the thirst some (younger?) people have about performance etc, but unless you are actually doing something heavy with your pc I don't think you'll notice the difference between cpu X and Y nowadays. I used to be into comparing cpu's and reading about it a lot, now I just don't have the time and can't be excited about it anymore..sigh..

 

[Witcher1979]

no-one will ever admit buying one would they?

EDIT: I retract, for some reason I thought they were a lot more expensive then the i5. Did they have a big price drop? Prices for them look OK to me. Only reason I was going to bash was the fact I thought for some reason they were £200+ when in fact you can get one here for £160 ish with £20 cashback....

Bargain

 

[Evil-I]

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.

Not wanting to throw fuel on the fire, but the OCUK forum is a forum for enthusiasts, and as such we tend to be enthusiastic about the speed of our computers and what they are capabale of doing, why else would we overclock? Yes, in the real world for average tasks its often completely irelevant, but hey.

I disagree that the forum is Intel biased, typically it tends to be slightly biased toward whichever camp has the fastest/ most economical bang for buck. For instance I remember the good old days of my Athlon XP 2500M CPU in an Abit NF7 motherboard. The whole forum was massively AMD biased at the time as Intel had really dropped the ball for a while and the AMD CPU's were overclocking demons.

Currently I'd say Intel are winning on the high end performance front, but the AMD CPUs are a much better bang for buck. Thats the nature of the computer industry. I'd say the reason that the bulldozer launch has not been massively well received, is that people expect a fairly significant performance increase from a new generation CPU and so far the bulldozer isn't really giving that.

Am I slating AMD by saying that?

No.

For those that can Remember the first generation Pentium 4's, they performed like complete dogs compared to the Pentium 3's they replaced and were also tied into massively expensive RDRAM..... Sometimes a new generation just starts slightly disappointingly....

E-I

 

[Gashman]

there price has been artificially high for a while, based on lack of availability more than anything, but now that its settling down a bit, prices are coming down to where they should be, got my 8120 from a competitor (with same £20 cash-back offer) for £155, which makes it ~£135 in total in the end, which is nice amount cheaper than 2500K. also the power consumption 'issues' are a load of rubbish as well, only have a 550W power supply so according too all the 'doom' sayers, a Bulldozer and a 4870X2, impossible right? wrong, had the power supply for ages as well, sturdy as hell!

only problem I had was originally setting the thing up, this board just outright refused to work with my Kingston memory at first, after prolonged fiddling around with slots and what not, managed to get into desktop so one could download new BIOS which fixes the bleeding issue.

 

[sunama]

From what I understand, the power which the BD uses at stock (or when mildly overclocked), is only a small increase, compared with the Intel CPUs. For this reason, your psu (even an old one), should not complain when using a BD CPU.

Now, the real (extra) power usage kicks in, when you start overclocking.

Also, it is usually the video card which draws the high power from a PSU...not the CPU.

Sure, if you run the CPU 24-7, there will be a difference in your power bill, however, if you don't overclock and don't run your CPU 24-7, then you will probably not notice any difference.

If you want to use a low power PSU, its the video card which will give you the power savings.

The price you paid of £135 definitely makes it a worthy consideration (vs i2500k). However, at the full price of £155, you may as well buy Intel.

Prices need to hit the £130 mark, without any additional, one-off special offer discounts. At the right price, as with anything, the BD can definitely sell. No question about it. Prices need to come down and until AMD can supply enough CPUs to retail, this is unlikely to happen.

 

[Gashman]

I reckon at a similar price to the 2500K Bulldozer has enough strong points to make it worth consideration, unless someone has their mind dead set on Intel which is perfectly understandable, for the 8120 I think anything ~£140 and they would sell tons more, though for the usage I have been doing recently they seem rather fast dare I say.

my 8120 is running at the same speed as 8150 but with lower than default voltage, this is apparently really common, seems as though their voltage is needlessly high compared to what they actually need to run, same story with Llano based processors as well so far as I have read.

I agree though that Intel is at the moment the better option still, though various software patches and such might help out Bulldozers performance and get rid of that 'thread' jumping I have noticed on this one, but Intel will be king for a long time in the single core area, an area I think AMD are no longer even attempting to compete in, think about it like this Bulldozer is a reasonable powerful quad-core (eight-threaded) processor that is positioned to compete with the 2500K and 2600K, the 2600K is usually just too strong but the 2500K lags behind Bulldozer in numerous types of tests, but it truly shines in single-threaded tests leaving Bulldozer based processors for dead. its not that they are bad, like I keep saying more competitive than K10.5, just in different areas than before, beating Intel at tasks rather than just 'coming a close second...', now to me that is a step in the right direction?!

Edit: also selling them isn't a problem for AMD at the moment, the problem appears to manufacturing enough of them, quickly enough to make a net gain from the sales.

 

[areksnumbr1sxylady]

I think FX-8120 is a better option over 2500k, but FX-8150 I believe is completely out place... While searching and configuring my rig I seen various tests, and concluded that for me there would be no real difference between 2500k and 8120, but I believed that 8120 had potential to shine when new windows comes out... while intel was already out of juice. The reason I didnt get 8120 was that I decided to look at 200-250 pounds processor and choice between 8150 and 2700k was an easy one... But if I was opting for 2500k I would`ve picked bulldozer 8120.

 

[chaotic_uk]

so what does the fx8120 overclock like ? , hit a wall on my phenom II 1100T @4ghz and want something else to play with lol.
i know my mobo has a beta bios that supports the fx cpu's but is it worth it and just get a new am3+ mobo to reduce problems

 

[sunama]

...but I believed that 8120 had potential to shine when new windows comes out... while Intel was already out of juice...

I wouldn't quite say that Intel was out of juice.

Sure, the 8120 may perform better on Windows8, but then the 2500k may perform just as well, if not better.

The fact is that right now, i2500k is better, plain and simple. To buy in the hope that in the future...maybe.... if MS decide to program their new OS properly and optimise is for BD architecture...maybe...AMD BD will perform better than i2500k, is not logical thinking. It is far more likely that Win8 will perform better with a i2500k powering it than a 8120.

It has been shown that Win8 performance should should roughly a 10% improvement (compared with Win7), for BD, however, is this enough for it to be able to overtake the i2500k? I don't think it is.

When you consider that i2500k overclocks like a demon, the BD is left dead in the water.

The only time that BD becomes a genuinely viable choice is if it is vastly cheaper than the i2500k and if the user will not be overclocking....and if you are buying a i2500k, then you are almost certainly going to be overclocking, otherwise you would just buy the i2500.

In any case, the first gen BD seems bad. I'm sure that a BD2 will be released and a lot of the bugs will be worked out and this should offer something more competitive. I actually think that AMD are on the right track. It just so happens that their first gen BD is up against the best commercially available CPU ever produced (ie. the i2500k/i2600k).