Bulldozer “Zambezi” FX-8150 twenty Game Benchmarks with CrossFire vs. Phenom II and Core i7

Posted by On October 13, 2011 5 Comments



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)

PerfSummary 1 Bulldozer Zambezi FX 8150 twenty Game Benchmarks with CrossFire vs. Phenom II and Core i7

PerfSummary 2 Bulldozer Zambezi FX 8150 twenty Game Benchmarks with CrossFire vs. Phenom II and Core i7

There is a lot more coming from us in the next few hours including the following:

The Synthetic and Real World Tests

Stay tuned .. a few more hours …

Mark Poppin

ABT Senior Editor

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