Bulldozer “Zambezi” FX-8150 twenty Game Benchmarks with CrossFire vs. Phenom II and Core i7
The new “Bulldozer” FX-series CPUs released today from AMD and ABT has been evaluating the “Zambezi” 8-core flagship FX-8150 for the past 5 days. We naturally want to know if it is a good upgrade from AMD’s aging Phenom II architecture and we will be comparing its performance to our overclocked 980 Black Edition also on the AM3+ platform and also to our overclocked Intel Core i7-920 LGA-1366 platform.
We will briefly introduce the new FX Bulldozer architecture and then head right into our evaluation which will highlight performance in 20 modern games at 1920×1200 and 2560×1600. We will also run synthetic and real world benchmarks on our stock-clocked and overclocked FX 8150. We work to establish its performance in games when paired with a single HD 6970 and also with HD 6970 CrossFire-X2. In this way, we will see if the FX-8150 is worth the $245 that AMD is asking for it.
We notice that FX 8150 is positioned against Intel’s enthusiast CPU line-up and directly against the upper-midrange Core i5 2500K. Considering that AMD is introducing their new flagship processor at $245, we can expect that its performance should be between the 2500K and 2600K.
. . . we are still working to get a finished evaluation to you. Unfortunately, the ASUS AM3+ CrossHair V motherboard that AMD sent us for evaluation was dead on arrival and we waited two days for a replacement. This is a highly unusual situation as AMD tests their boards before sending them out for evaluation. The replacement board worked fine except for suspect CrossFire scaling numbers in a few games with the FX-8150.
The complete evaluation will be published in a few hours. In the meantime, we’d like to present the Summary Chart of 23 benchmarks – 20 modern games – with FX 8150 stock and overclocked versus the Phenom II 980 BE at 4.3GHz and versus the Core i7-920 at 3.8GHz (turbo to 4GHz)
There is a lot more coming from us in the next few hours including the following:
The Synthetic and Real World Tests
- Super Pi
- Fritz Chess
- Sandra
- PCMark Vantage
- Custom PC
- Cinebench
- x264
Stay tuned .. a few more hours …
Mark Poppin
ABT Senior Editor
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Thank you for all your hard work. Bummers to hear about board.
Am especially interested to see detailed Fritz results (and info on version). I think you may be the only one I know of to use one of the most taxing(cpu wise) programs that thread batters like no other.
Any chance to see complete details on all equipment used?
Especially thanks for keeping open minded about results until they are all in.
Looking forward to your conclusions.
My complete evaluation should be up late tonight with all the details including the complete listing of all of the Hardware. There is a Typo in the chart that needs to be fixed in the final article – I used HD 6970 CrossFire – not HD 6870.
Also recognize that we believe that there are real scaling issues with CrossFire and the AM3+ MB. For Part two of this Bulldozer evaluation, we will again do a clean install of Win 7 on a newer MB BIOS and also set up a Nvidia HDD with GTX 580 and GTX 580 SLI.
Glad to sell the i7 920 doing so well. Though for the scaling, seems right. I went from a q9550 @ 3.6 (780i sucks) with 2 gtx470’s to a i7 920 @4.2ghz and i saw massive improvements. Could be that the 780i chipset and the fsb was holding the cards back, but I did gain a whole 10k in 3dmark vantage. Clock for clock the i7 2600k didnt seem to be as much of a jump in sli gaming performance. I do think that lga2011 will make tri sli/fire alot better though. BTW a q9550 (yorkfield) is faster clock for clock then phenom 955 (deneb. On a ud3p board i got my q9550 upto 4.2ghz and that chip is from 08 so its kinda sad to see amd still kicking out chips that perform like like core2 based products.
Hi, which Board, Memory and Bios for Board and Driver do you use?
Hi. Look at the finished article just above this one on the main page:
AMD’s FX-8150 vs. Core i7 & Phenom II – Bulldozer Arrives!
http://alienbabeltech.com/main/amds-fx-8150-vs-core-i7-phenom-ii-bulldozer-arrives
The BIOS tested with was the shipping BIOS; the same one that AMD did their internal testing on.
I have already begun testing for Part two and it will include SLI to see what went wrong with CrossFire scaling on the AM3+ MB.