AMD FX-8150 review

OVERCLOCKING

As the FX-8150 has an unlocked multiplier, you can overclock the processor without overclocking your RAM and the motherboard’s chipset. With the stock cooler, we only managed to get it up to 4.2GHz, but with a Cooler Master V8 cooler (£45 from www.expansys.com) we could set the processor multiplier to 45x to see a stable 4.5GHz – an increase of 900MHz. At this speed, our overall benchmarks score increased to 96 – a 10 per cent improvement. It’s a useful speed boost, but it’s overshadowed by the overclockability of Intel’s Core i5-2500K. Even with the stock cooler we could get this up to 4GHz, an increase of 700MHz, and this led to an overall score of 118 in our benchmarks – far ahead of AMD’s chip.

CONCLUSION

It’s great news to see a new core architecture from AMD after four years, but the Bulldozer-based FX-8150 isn’t as quick as we’d hoped. The main problem is that each individual core isn’t as fast as each individual core in Intel’s Sandy Bridge processors, leading to slower overall performance in our benchmarks. Part of the issue is that most software isn’t written to take advantage of so many cores, so it’s hard to push this processor to its limits. Running two sets of our benchmarks at once to push the processor showed it could be faster than its Intel rival when all cores have to be used, but this is unlikely to happen in everyday use. Given that you need to buy a new motherboard to use the Bulldozer chips, you may as well buy an Intel Sandy Bridge motherboard and processor.