AMD FX 8150 Black Edition 8-Core Review (with Gigabyte 990FXA-UD7)

On the last page we listed the system builds used for the review today. We are aiming to compare the FX 8150 processor against the leading ‘last generation' AMD Phenom II X6 1100T and the Intel Core i5 2500k and Intel Core i7 2600k. As the FX 8150 is a direct replacement for the 1100T our results today will give an indication of the gains to be expected.

AMD have recommended we test with many synthetic benchmark suites that probably less than 0.5% of you have ever even heard of. We will add one or two of their requests into our overall suite, but we aren't dominating our testing today with synthetic scripts we never use, or have any interest in. We think you guys will have much more interest in seeing how the hardware performs in real world situations, such as when encoding video or rendering 3D content. This is why the synthetic section today only comprises a very small percentage of the overall testing.

While the Core i5 2500k and Core i7 2600k systems are vastly different platforms, we have tried to keep the system builds as closely matched as possible. We used memory all at the same 1600mhz clock speed, to keep results as closely rated to the CPU performance as possible.

CPUZ shows our system build, centralised around the FX 8150 processor. We are using 8GB of G-Skill memory with timings of 9-9-9.

Strangely enough, at reference speeds we couldn't get a validation from CPUz, although later in the review when we come to overclock, we did. You can see the link for this hardware build over here.

Earlier in the review we are aiming to show you the reference performance of the new FX 8150 when compared against the reference clocked Core i5 2500k, Core i7 2600k and AMD Phenom 1100T in a variety of synthetic and real world benchmarks. We will then move into game testing and finally an overclocking section, with a head to head against other processors at identical clock speeds.

AMD have a comprehensive software suite for fine tuning the system directly in Windows. We will however be handling all our overclocking directly in the bios, the traditional way.

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