AMD FX-8150 Bulldozer Processor Review

DMark 11


We expectedly ran 3DMark 11 in all 3 settings and here are our results. There isn't really anything spectacular. By comparison with our 2600K in the Performance test we ran, the 2600K got a physics score of 8919 and our i5-2500K got a score of 6900. This is in contrast to our score of 6481 in the physics subscore with the FX-8150 processor. Admittedly, this result is a little disappointing, but there's a possibility that some performance optimizations could be made to make it run better.

PCMark 7


We decided to run PCMark 7 mostly because it is a whole system benchmark that effectively evaluates the system in a way that most users would likely experience the system. As such, it tests everything in the system ranging from the GPU, CPU, Hard Disks, and RAM in real-world-like scenarios. Admittedly, this is still a very controlled benchmark but its as close as some of these benchmarks will come to being real world.

In PCMark 7 we got a score of 4206 which wasn't quite amazing nor too bad as we've seen scores ranging from 300 to 1800 all the way up to 6000. As we benchmark more and more systems we'll likely have a better fix on how effective these scores gauge performance. At this time we're mostly including it for the sake of record and potential comparison as PCMark 7 is still relatively new and unused.

LinX


In LinX, graphical interface for the Linpack,  we were able to evaluate the linpack benchmark which is comparable to the one used in high-performance computing arena. Also, we used LinX in a nice 4-hour long stress test to see how hot the chip would get under our Corsair H100 cooler that we ran. With Linx we obtained approximately 30.7894 GFLOPS peak performance after running 464 loops of the test.

PassMark

With PassMark we effectively used it as a quick and easy benchmark for multiple CPU tests and were able to compare against the Core i7 2600K and the Core i5 2500K processor. By giving it a look we can see that the FX-8150 for the most part stays behind the 2600K in terms of performance with the exception of the Floating Point Math CPU test. Also, we must say that this version of the application was specifically stated to already be working properly with Bulldozer unlike many other tests out there. Getting back to the test, we can see the FX-8150 mostly staying ahead of the i5 2500K but behind the i7 2600K, which in reality is really where we see AMD trying to position this processor.


Video Encoding Testing
We have used two popular multimedia benchmarks for encoding the video. Handbrake and X264 HD Benchmark are most commonly used, and in our conversations with Intel engineers, they were especially coy about media skipping testing Bulldozer with Handbrake. We tested Bulldozer with Handbrake and you can see the results for themselves.

Handbrake


In handbrake, we took a 1080P source file and converted it to qHD resolution in order to illustrate the transcoding capabilities of the FX-8150 processor. As you can see from the screenshot, we were getting an average FPS of 95.5 and it took about 21 minutes to complete.

X264 HD Benchmark 4.0


Taking a look at this benchmark we can see a direct comparison between all of the latest processors from both Intel and AMD. Taking a quick glance we can see that the Intel i7 2600K definitely dominates this test without a doubt with the i5 2500K beating the FX-8150 in the first pass but losing to the FX-8150 in the second pass. We'll consider that a push.