AMD FX-8150 Bulldozer Processor Review

Overclocking
In terms of overclocking, we really didn't have that much time to spend overclocking the FX-8150 but in the short time that we did, we managed to get some pretty nice overclocks as well as overclocking performance out of the chip. The primary reason why we believe that overclocking is so important is because of the value proposition that AMD has placed on their brand and their products as a whole. Considering the fact that the FX-8150 is priced at $245 there is no doubt that AMD is continuing towards a value oriented segment but with more performance behind it.

The important part, of course, for any value based product is extra mileage after purchase. In this case, it comes in terms of overclockability. In our experience, the FX-8150 was not that hard to overclock up to 4.6GHz. It was actually extremely simple and required little to no voltage increases. We re-ran many of our benchmarks at 4.6GHz to show the benefits of a quick and easy overclock as well as the performance increases one can reap from having an unlocked processor that overclocks relatively easily.


AMD FX-8150 processor overclocked to 4.8GHz pushed the score from 5.86 from 7.76 points

In Cinebench R11.5 we went from a score of 5.86 at stock to 7.47 at 4.6GHz. This showed nearly a 1 to 1 ratio of clock performance to Cinebench score improvement as our overclock was 27% and our Cinebench performance increase was also 27%.

AMD FX-8150 processor wasn't stable at 4.8GHz, but on 4.6GHz scored quite nicely - 41.94 GFLOPS

In LinX we saw a linear increase in floating-point performance - clock the CPU at 4.6GHz is a 27% increase in clock, resulting with exactly the same 27% increase in performance.


Performance did not increase as much while overclocking the processor by 1.2GHz, up to 4.8GHz

In 3DMark11 we saw a solid increase in performance in the Entry level test going from a composite score of E7896 to E8445 with only an increase in CPU clockspeed. Performance scores rose from 5544 to 5678, while the Extreme scores rose by mere 10 points from X1864 to X1874, clearly showing a GPU bottleneck.


AMD FX-8150 at 4.8GHz significantly increases performance in an almost linear fashion

We also ran the x264 HD benchmark to witness the performance increases in HD video encoding and we saw the FX-8150 best the 2500K in both pass 1 and pass 2 and beat the 2600K in Pass 2. This illustrates that the FX-8150 does clock pretty well, but it does require quite a bit of clocking in order to be up to or beyond the level of the 2600K in a good amount of tests.



From our experience overclocking the FX-8150, it appears as though 4.6GHz was the overclocking sweet spot as it required very little effort and voltage bumping to attain. Furthermore, once we started moving up towards 4.7GHz and 4.8GHz we found ourselves pushing the voltages in larger and larger increments and the amount of performance gained began to diminish as we consumed more and more power per clock. In our short time of overclocking the FX-8150 we managed to attain a stable clockspeed of 4.8GHz (or 30% OC) as illustrated by our CPU-Z screenshot as well as our Cinebench score of 7.76 which had beat out our previous 7.47 at 4.6GHz. All of these overclocks were attained on all eight cores with turbo disabled.

Power and Heat
Since we were using an H100, heat was not much of an issue. As we stated before, the FX-8150 was able to be put under full load for 4 hours without breaking 44C and none of the cores got any hotter than 35C. This is most likely a testament to the H100's cooling capability, but as we can see in the hardware monitor screenshot the FX-8150 never went over that 44C barrier. Furthermore, in terms of power consumption the FX-8150 is great in terms of idle power only consuming on average around 85W.
 
Under load, though, the CPU consumed as much as 209w which is more than what we've seen from AMD processors in the past. This is a little disappointing in terms of being energy efficient, but we really are optimistic that there will be further revisions to this design perhaps with a die shrink that will improve the power consumption greatly. Then again, it does still overclock quite well and I'd be afraid to go back and check the power consumption of the chip at 4.8GHz.