AMD FX-8120 Black Edition CPU Review (with Asus M5A99X EVO)

1. Introduction2. ASUS M5A99X EVO: Packaging and Bundle3. Asus M5A99X EVO: Layout and Features4. Asus M5A99X EVO: BIOS5. Overclocking the AMD FX-81206. Testing Methodology7. Synthetic: 3DMark 118. Synthetic: 3DMark Vantage9. Synthetic: PCMark 710. Synthetic: Unigine Heaven Benchmark11. Synthetic: SiSoft Sandra 201212. Synthetic: Cinebench R11.513. Synthetic: Super Pi14. Synthetic: CrystalDiskMark15. Real World: Media Encoding16. Real World: MKV Playback17. Gaming: DiRT 318. Gaming: Grand Theft Auto 4: EFLC19. Technical: Power Consumption20. Closing Thoughts21. View All Pages

Back in October we conducted an in-depth test of AMD's FX-8150 Black Edition, the range topping processor based on their latest Bulldozer architecture.  We were reasonably impressed with the chip as it overclocked well and outperformed the Intel Core i5-2500K in a number of tests.

Over the last few weeks, AMD has adjusted the pricing of both the AMD FX-8150 Black Edition and the AMD FX-8120 Black Edition to make them more competitive against the Intel Core i5 2500K and 2400.

While we covered the FX-8150 Black Edition in depth when Bulldozer launched, we haven't had a chance to test the slightly less powerful FX-8120 Black Edition until now.

Aside from the lower base clocks and turbo clocks, the FX-8120 Black Edition is essentially the same as the FX-8150 Black Edition. They both feature eight cores, 8 MB of L2 and L3 cache and a TDP of 125W.

The FX-8120 Black Edition is clocked at 3.1 GHz with a turbo core frequency of of 3.4 GHz and a maximum turbo frequency of 4.0 GHz.  The FX-8150 Black Edition, on the other hand, is clocked at 3.6 GHz with a turbo core frequency of 3.9 GHz and a maximum turbo frequency of 4.2 GHz.

We have already taken an in-depth look at the Bulldozer architecture in our launch review over here, so we won't be covering this in the review today.

AMD have kindly supplied us with an Asus M5A99X EVO motherboard for this review, featuring the AMD 990X Chipset. We will be comparing the AMD FX-8120 Black Edition with an Intel Core i5-2500k in this review.

Asus supply the M5A99X EVo within a standard sized motherboard box that is decorated in a black livery.  The top of the box is littered with badges which advertise the key features of the motherboard.

Turning the box over reveals a very detailed breakdown of the motherboards key features alongside a list of specifications and a diagram of the motherboard within.  The box itself is strong and will protect the motherboard against rough handling during shipping.

We find the usual comprehensive Asus bundle inside. This contains a detailed user guide, a pair of Q-connectors, a CrossFireX bridge, four SATA cables, a software CD and an I/O shield.  This is quite an impressive bundle for a mid-range motherboard.

Asus have adopted a black and blue colour scheme for the Asus M5A99X EVO.  The PCB itself is black and the board has a combination of black, blue and white fittings.

There is a substantial heatsink to the left of the CPU socket which will help to cool the power regulation circuitry supplying the CPU.  The chipset is located just below the power regulation circuitry and is covered with a similarly styled blue heatsink.  Asus haven't placed the heatsinks too close to the CPU socket so there shouldn't be any issues installing CPU coolers of any size.  We used a Noctua NH-D14 for testing which fitted easily.

We find the 8-pin power connector for the CPU nestled just above the heatsink, along the top edge of the board in close proximity to the CPU socket.

All four of the DDR3 memory slots are located just to the right of the CPU socket and are black and blue in colour highlighting the different channels.

Be warned that large CPU coolers such as the Noctua NH-D14 will obstruct some of these RAM slots, so low profile memory may be required.  The board supports up to 32 GB of unbuffered memory running at speeds of 2133 (OC)/1866/1600/1333/1066 MHz in a dual channel configuration.

The internal USB3.0 header is located just underneath the memory slots, which isn't ideal for most cases as it can be difficult to route cables neatly.  We would have preferred to see this located along the bottom edge of the motherboard.  We also find the 24-pin power connector and a 3-pin fan header adjacent to the memory slots.

Moving further down the right hand side of the motherboard we find the eight SATA ports in total.  Six of these are SATA-600 ports connected to the AMD SB950 controller which support RAID 0, 1, 5 and 10.  The two remaining SATA-300 ports are connected to the JMicron JMB362 controller which also feeds the onboard eSATA ports.

Along the bottom edge of the motherboard we find all the front panel headers.  These include an HD Audio connector, three USB2.0 connectors a fan header and the front panel switch and LED connectors.  We also find a further 3-pin fan header and switches for the TPU and EPU here.

There are three PCI Express x16 slots on the motherboard in total.  The top two will only run at x16 if there is a single graphics card installed in the system and will switch down to x8 with dual graphics cards installed.  The motherboard supports both Quad SLI and Quad CrossfireX. The third runs in x4 mode when three cards are installed.  In addition to the three PCI Express x16 slots, there are two PCI Express x1 slots and a single legacy PCI slot.

The rear I/O panel supports:

• 1x PS2 connector keyboard/mouse combo port
• 1x eSATA 3 GB/s
• 1x Power eSATA 3 GB/s
• 1x IEEE 1394a
• 1x LAN (RJ45) port
• 2x  USB3.0 ports
• 8x USB2.0 ports
• 1x Optical S/PDIF out
• 6x Audio jacks

We are greeted by Asus' usual UEFI interface which is by far the best out there on the market.  It looks great and is very easy to use, both for basic and more advanced users.  The advanced section provides every possible option we could ask for when overclocking the AMD FX-8120.

For those without the technical know how to achieve massive overclocks by tweaking all the different settings, Asus include a automatic overclocking feature on the ‘AI Tweaker' page.  This will provide a decent boost in performance without much effort at all.

Asus also includes a BIOS update utility which makes the update process very simple indeed.  We updated the BIOS to the latest version before testing the motherboard.

As you'll have seen on the previous page, Asus have used the same excellent UEFI interface for the M5A99X-EVO that they use on many of their motherboards.  This makes the overclocking process quite simple indeed.

First of all we tried out the automatic overclocking function that Asus has devised.  This can be found on the ‘AI Tweaker' page of the UEFI interface along with all of the other settings for overclocking.  This managed to overclock the FX-8120 to 3.875 GHz using a baseclock of 250 MHz and a multiplier of 15.5x for an overclock of 775 Mhz.

See validation here.

For those who aren't confident enough to manually overclock their CPU, the automatic overclocking function will provide quite a significant boost in performance.

We had mixed success when overclocking the FX-8120 manually.  We managed to push the CPU to 4.2 GHz using a baseclock of 200 MHz and a multiplier of 21x without adjusting the voltages at all.  This is also very simple for less advanced users and is the setting we used for our overclocked benchmark results.

See validation here.

Unfortunately 4.2 GHz seemed to be the limitation of this particular chip as we weren't able to achieve a completely stable overclock higher than this, even when using very high volts of 1.40 – 1.45V.

We were able to achieve higher overclocks which were stable with Prime95 however different types of benchmark such as 3DMark or Cinebench would cause random instability.

We also tried the FX-8120 with a ASRock 990FX Fatal1ty motherboard and HD 6670 and experienced the same 4.2 GHz stability limit with this chip.

So we decided to see how far we could push the FX-8120 in the 990FX Fatal1ty while still getting our system to boot. We managed to achieve a massive 2000 MHz overclock, giving us 5.1 GHz using a baseclock of 200, multiplier of 25.5x and core voltage of 1.475v. We tested with Cinebench for a minute without encountering stability issues. We would be lying to claim it was usable 24/7 however.

See validation here.

For comparison purposes we overclocked our i5-2500K to 4.2 GHz to give a clock-by-clock comparison with the FX-8120.  We also tested the i5-2500K at 4.7 GHz which is the highest we've been able to achieve with this particular i5-2500K chip.

These two settings cover two scenarios. The first being a solid overclock of 4.2ghz, easily achievable with stock air cooling and limited bios knowledge. Then 4.7ghz which requires increased core voltage and enhanced cooling.

See Validations for 4.2 GHz here and 4.7 GHz here.

In this review we are going to benchmark the AMD FX-8120 Black Edition at reference clock speeds and when overclocked to 4.2 GHz. We will be comparing it to a similarly specified i5-2500K based system which is detailed below. A 2500 is priced around £170 inc vat in the UK today – this is one of Intel's most popular mid range processors in the enthusiast sector. The FX-8120 is priced around £135 inc vat in the UK today. AMD motherboards are still generally quite expensive however, so the overall cost of ownership can tend to balance out.

All Intel Core i5 processors overclock to 4.2ghz easily enough, even the Core i5 2300, so it is almost irrelevant which Intel Core i5 we use for comparison in an overclocked state today.

We used a Noctua NH-D14 to cool the AMD FX-8120 Black Edition and a Phanteks PH-TC14PE to cool the i5-2500K.

Test System

Processor: AMD FX-8120 Black Edition (reference speeds and 4.2ghz)
Motherboard: Asus M5A99X EVO
Cooler: Noctua NH-D14
Thermal Paste: Arctic Cooling MX-3
Memory: 8 GB G.Skill @ 1600 MHz 9-9-9-24
Graphics Card: AMD Radeon HD 6950
Power Supply: Thermaltake Toughpower XT 750W
System Drive: Intel 520 Series 2400 GB
Monitor: Viewsonic VX2260WM
Operating System: Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit)

Motherboard (for Max OC): ASRock 990FX Fatal1ty
Graphics Card (for Max OC): AMD Radeon HD 6670

Comparison System

Processor: Intel Core i5-2500K (reference speeds and 4.2ghz)
Motherboard: Biostar TZ77XE4
Cooler: Phanteks PH-TC14PE
Thermal Paste: Arctic Cooling MX-3
Memory: 8 GB G.Skill @ 1600 MHz 9-9-9-24
Graphics Card: AMD Radeon HD 6950
Power Supply: Thermaltake Toughpower XT 750W
System Drive: Intel 520 Series 2400 GB
Monitor: Viewsonic VX2260WM
Operating System: Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit)

Software:

PCMark 7
3DMark 11
SiSoft Sandra 2012 SP3
Cinebench R11.5
CrystalDiskMark
Cyberlink MediaEspresso 6.5
VLC Media Player
Performance Monitor
Unigine Heaven Benchmark
Super Pi 1.5 Mod
CPUID Hardware Monitor
CPU-Z
DiRT 3
Grand Theft Auto: Episodes from Liberty City

3DMark 11 is designed for testing DirectX 11 hardware running on Windows 7 and Windows Vista. The benchmark includes six all new benchmark tests that make extensive use of all the new features in DirectX 11 including tessellation, compute shaders and multi-threading.

After running the tests 3DMark gives your system a score with larger numbers indicating better performance. Trusted by gamers worldwide to give accurate and unbiased results, 3DMark 11 is the best way to test DirectX 11 under game-like loads.

If you want to learn more about this benchmark, or to buy it yourself, head over to this page.

In this test we can see that the FX-8120 lags behind the i5-2500K slightly in terms of overall performance.  When overclocked, the FX-8120 offers slightly better performance than the 2500K at stock settings.

Futuremark released 3DMark Vantage, on April 28, 2008. It is a benchmark based upon DirectX 10, and therefore will only run under Windows Vista (Service Pack 1 is stated as a requirement) and Windows 7. This is the first edition where the feature-restricted, free of charge version could not be used any number of times. 1280×1024 resolution was used with performance settings.

These results reflect what we saw in 3DMark 11.  The FX-8120 can just beat the stock i5-2500K when it's overclocked but falls far behind when the i5-2500K is overclocked to the same speed.

PCMark 7 includes 7 PC tests for Windows 7, combining more than 25 individual workloads covering storage, computation, image and video manipulation, web browsing and gaming. Specifically designed to cover the full range of PC hardware from netbooks and tablets to notebooks and desktops, PCMark 7 offers complete PC performance testing for Windows 7 for home and business use.

In this test the stock Intel Core i5-2500K based system highlighted much stronger system wide performance than the reference clocked FX-8120 system.

Unigine provides an interesting way to test hardware. It can be easily adapted to various projects due to its elaborated software design and flexible toolset. A lot of their customers claim that they have never seen such extremely-effective code, which is so easy to understand.

Heaven Benchmark is a DirectX 11 GPU benchmark based on advanced Unigine engine from Unigine Corp. It reveals the enchanting magic of floating islands with a tiny village hidden in the cloudy skies. Interactive mode provides emerging experience of exploring the intricate world of steampunk.

Efficient and well-architected framework makes Unigine highly scalable:

• Multiple API (DirectX 9 / DirectX 10 / DirectX 11 / OpenGL) render
• Cross-platform: MS Windows (XP, Vista, Windows 7) / Linux
• Full support of 32bit and 64bit systems
• Multicore CPU support
• Little / big endian support (ready for game consoles)
• Powerful C++ API
• Comprehensive performance profiling system
• Flexible XML-based data structures

We use the stock settings for our tests.

The differences in performance between the two test systems in Unigine Heaven are very small.

SiSoftware Sandra (the System ANalyser, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) is an information & diagnostic utility. It should provide most of the information (including undocumented) you need to know about your hardware, software and other devices whether hardware or software. Sandra is a (girl) name of Greek origin that means “defender”, “helper of mankind”. We think that’s quite fitting.

It works along the lines of other Windows utilities, however it tries to go beyond them and show you more of what’s really going on. Giving the user the ability to draw comparisons at both a high and low-level. You can get information about the CPU, chipset, video adapter, ports, printers, sound card, memory, network, Windows internals, AGP, PCI, PCI-X, PCIe (PCI Express), database, USB, USB2, 1394/Firewire, etc.

Native ports for all major operating systems are available:

• Windows XP, 2003/R2, Vista, 7, 2008/R2 (x86)
• Windows XP, 2003/R2, Vista, 7, 2008/R2 (x64)
• Windows 2003/R2, 2008/R2* (IA64)
• Windows Mobile 5.x (ARM CE 5.01)
• Windows Mobile 6.x (ARM CE 5.02)

All major technologies are supported and taken advantage of:

• SMP – Multi-Processor
• MC – Multi-Core
• SMT/HT – Hyper-Threading
• MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSSE3, SSE 4.1, SSE 4.2, AVX, FMA – Multi-Media instructions
• GPGPU, DirectX, OpenGL – Graphics
• NUMA – Non-Uniform Memory Access
• AMD64/EM64T/x64 – 64-bit extensions to x86
• IA64 – Intel* Itanium 64-bit

In the arithmetic and multimedia tests the FX-8120 has a clear advantage over the i5-2500K as SiSoft Sandra is able to harness the power of all eight cores.  In the cryptography test the FX-8120 achieved better performance in the overall bandwidth and SHA256 tests even though the i5-2500K came out on top in the AES256 test.

The i5-2500K system also outperformed the FX-8120 in the memory bandwidth test.

Cinebench R11.5 is the newest revision of the popular benchmark from Maxon. The test scenario uses all of your system’s processing power to render a photorealistic 3D scene (from the viral “No Keyframes” animation by AixSponza). This scene makes use of various different algorithms to stress all available processor cores.

In fact, CINEBENCH can measure systems with up to 64 processor threads. The test scene contains approximately 2,000 objects containing more than 300,000 total polygons and uses sharp and blurred reflections, area lights and shadows, procedural shaders, antialiasing, and much more. The result is given in points (pts). The higher the number, the faster your processor.

Cinebench lets us see how the single threaded performance of the two processors compare.  It's quite clear that the single threaded performance of the FX-8120 is no match for that of the i5-2500K and the only reason the FX-8120 achieves good performance in the multi threaded tests is because it has twice the number of physical cores.

Super Pi is used by a huge audience, particularly to check stability when overclocking processors. If a system is able to calculate PI to the 2 millionth pace after the decimal without mistake, it is considered to be stable in regards to RAM and CPU.

Again we can see how superior the single threaded performance of the i5-2500K is compared to the FX-8120, taking less than half the time to complete this test at stock settings.

Crystalmark is a useful benchmark to measure theoretical performance levels of hard drives and SSD’s. We are using V3.0 x64.

Today we are testing with the Intel 520 Series 240 GB SSD system drive.

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We have no performance concerns with the Asus Motherboard SATA ports, scoring almost 500 MB/s in the sequential read test.

CyberLink MediaEspresso 6.5 is the successor to CyberLink MediaShow Espresso 5.5. With its further optimized CPU/GPU-acceleration, MediaEspresso is an even faster way to convert not only your video but also your music and image files between a wide range of popular formats.

Now you can easily playback and display your favourite movies, songs and photos not just on your mobile phone, iPad, PSP, Xbox, or Youtube and Facebook channels but also on the newly launched iPhone 4. Compile, convert and enjoy images and songs on any of your computing devices and enhance your videos with CyberLink’s built-in TrueTheater Technology.

New and Improved Features

• Ultra Fast Media Conversion – With support from the Intel Core i-Series processor family, ATI Stream & NVIDIA CUDA, MediaEspresso’s Batch-Conversion function enables multiple files to be transcoded simultaneously.
• Smart Detect Technology – MediaEspresso 6 automatically detects the type of portable device connected to the PC and selects the best multimedia profile to begin the conversion without the need for user’s intervention.
• Direct Sync to Portable Devices – Video, audio and image files can be transferred in a few easy steps to mobile phones including those from Acer, BlackBerry, HTC, Samsung, LG, Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, and Palm, as well as Sony Walkman and PSP devices.
• Enhanced Video Quality – CyberLink TrueTheater Denoise and Lighting enables the enhancement of video quality through optical noise filters and automatic brightness adjustment.
• Video, Music and Image File Conversion – Convert not only videos to popular formats such as AVI, MPEG, MKV, H.264/AVC, and FLV at the click of a button, but also images such as JPEG and PNG and music files like WMA, MP3 and M4A.
• Online Sharing – Conversion to video formats used by popular social networking websites and a direct upload feature means posting videos to Facebook and YouTube has never been easier.

For our testing today we are converting a 1.09GB 720p MKV file (44mins) to Apple Mp4 format for playback on a portable device. This is a common procedure for many people and will give a good indication of system power. We are using the newest version of this program.

It seems that MediaEspresso is able to harness the performance of the eight cores of the FX-8120 as it achieved better performance than the i5-2500K in this test both at stock settings and when overclocked.

Many people who have media systems will be familiar with the Matroska (.mkv) file format which is often used for high definition video. In this test we will be using VLC Media Player to play a 1080P MKV file while recording CPU usage using Performance Monitor.

Here we see quite similar performance between the two chips, although the Core i5 2500k has the slight edge.

DiRT 3 was released quite recently and has received a lot of praise from gamers and reviewers across the globe. It is the latest iteration of the Colin McRae Rally series, despite Codemasters dropping the Colin McRae branding. It supports DirectX 11 which enhances detail and brings a number of other visual enhancements to the gaming experience.

It seems that DiRT 3 is also optimised for the AMD hardware as we achieved significantly higher framerates with the FX-8120 than the Core i5 2500k

Grand Theft Auto: Episodes From Liberty City is a standalone compilation of the DLC episodes forGrand Theft Auto IV, containing both The Lost and Damned and The Ballad of Gay Tony on one disc. It was released alongside the DLC release of The Ballad of Gay Tony on 29 October 2009 for the Xbox 360 and released on 13 April 2010 for Microsoft Windows and Playstation 3. It does not require a copy of Grand Theft Auto IV to play, nor is an Xbox Live or PSN account necessary (except for multiplayer).

The engine is still extremely demanding for this game – even now for the newest hardware. The latest version changes some of the rendering calls and is used partially within the latest Max Payne engine. The settings we used to test this game are displayed in the screenshot below.

It's a very different story to DiRT 3 here as the Intel based system achieved significantly better performance in this test.  It's a very CPU intensive game and it doesn't appear to be able to utilise the performance of all eight cores of the FX-8120.

We measured the power consumption of our entire test system at the wall while loading the CPU using Prime95. We recorded results with the system at reference clock speeds and when overclocked to 4.2 GHz.

The Intel i5-2500K draws much less power than the FX-8120 at stock settings and when overclocked.  Even when overclocked much higher than the AMD FX-8150 (4.7ghz v 4.2ghz), the Intel 2500K consumers less power under load.

Overall we are left with generally positive impressions of the AMD FX-8120 Black Edition processor.  We were able to achieve a reasonable overclock of 4.2 GHz without even having to adjust the CPU voltage.  This resulted in a decent boost in performance throughout our set of benchmarks, letting the FX-8120 rival the i5-2500K at stock settings in a number of tests.

It was disappointing that we couldn't push the chip further than 4.2 GHz without encountering stability issues in some benchmarks, even with plenty of voltage applied. By comparison, our Core i5 2500k could easily hit 4.7ghz with a voltage increase.

That said, we achieved an impressive 5.1 GHz maximum overclock with the FX-8120 in our ASRock 990FX Fatal1ty motherboard, although this wasn't 100% stable under load. While we achieved a verification, we wouldn't use these settings on a daily basis. With only one FX-8120 at hand it may be possible that we received a weak sample for review.

For verification, we attempted to overclock the FX-8120 with an ASRock 990FX Fatal1ty motherboard which costs over £50 more.  It offers everything an enthusiast user could want, including Quad SLI and CrossfireX support. Complete stability was still limited at 4.2ghz.

We are quite impressed with what the Asus M5A99X EVO motherboard offers and it pairs well with the FX-8120 processor.

This does raise another minor concern for us because we do feel that AMD need to start working with their partners to drop the prices of their motherboards. In recent months high quality Intel motherboards are available for £80 in the UK today.

We have managed to get the Core i5 2500k overclocked to 4.8ghz with this Gigabyte motherboard, offering a very cheap entry level point. The problem is compounded further by the fact that this product costs £20 less than the M5A99X Evo, which we tested today paired up with the FX8120.

The AMD FX-8120 Black Edition can be yours for a price of £135 from OCUK which makes it about £20 cheaper than the AMD FX-8150 and Intel i5-2500K.

Even though it offers better performance than the i5-2500K in a number of multi-threaded applications that can harness the power of all eight cores, most applications will perform at a lower level. The i5-2500K offers more overclocking headroom and much better performance in many other tests, so is a better choice for the enthusiast audience.

We would like to see the price falling to around £110 before we could recommend buying the FX-8120.

We would definitely recommend the Asus M5A99X EVO to anyone looking for a well featured 990X motherboard for an FX-8120 or FX-8150 CPU.  It can be yours for £100 from Overclockers UK.

KitGuru says: The price of the FX-8120 is still a little expensive but offers good performance in multi-threaded applications.

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