This is the much anticipated 8 core processor from AMD. This thing has been delayed more than a Tom Cruise movie. Despite AMD’s best efforts there have been quite a few “leaked” benchmarks and reviews regarding its performance. We are going to see if this new chip is worth the hype or if it falls flat on its face. The stage for this epic battle has been set for quite some time and Intel has been the reigning performance champ for many years now.
Gone are the glory days of the AMD Athlon 64 that completely trounced the Intel Pentium. This is AMD’s chance to take the crown back and show how they’ve used this time to come up with a processor that can finally dominate the performance market again.
This processor is based on the all new Zambezi architecture that features their new 32 nm manufacturing process. These processors have an amazing 16MBs of cache. That comes to eight Megs of level 3 cache and eight Megs of level 2 cache. This sounds pretty impressive, but it will depend on how the cache is accessed by the processing unit to boost performance.
AMD’s main feature that sets these processors apart it is that they now have a full set of 8 processing cores. This makes these the first commercially available 8 core desktop processors. This is no small feat for a company like AMD. AMD has been the go to brand for entry to mainstream level processors. With Intel now starting to really make headway in this market, AMD needs to step up their game and prove that they can still compete at the higher end of the spectrum. That is exactly what these processors are meant to do. This is why AMD has always made their latest chipsets backwards compatible with their previous socket of processors. AMD customers have come to expect this from their AMD chipsets and their new 9 series is no different.
8120 FX Performance
Testing Methodology
To test this new processor we paired it with a new ECS A990FXM-A motherboard with the latest BIOS update to support this new 8 core processor. We also paired it with an XFX AMD Radeon 6950 video card and four gigs of Kingston DDR3 1333 memory. We used a Western Digital 2 Terabyte Caviar Black SATA 3 hard drive and a Silverstone 1000 watt modular power supply to power it all.
With that being said we also used Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit and several benchmarking utilities to put through the gauntlet. PC Mark 7 is a great benchmark for giving an overall system score and stresses every major component of the system. 3D Mark 11 is a great graphical benchmark that also has physics built into it to stress the processor. We use Cinebench and SiSoft Sandra to target the CPU specifically. This is where we get to see how well the processor is able to really handle stressful applications.Benchmarks
Well where do I start? This has been one of the most underwhelming products that we’ve had here in quite some time. When you take into account the amount of hype that AMD produced for this new processor you almost had to expect it to perform well. This is sadly not the case.
In nearly every benchmark that we ran the Intel i5 2500k was able to beat this new processor. You have to remember that both of these units are available for roughly the same price. This makes AMD look really bad at this point and you have to wonder what the heck they were doing when they were delaying the launch. There was some news in the early part of the summer that this processor just didn’t have the power to live up to its hype. This processor though doesn’t even outperform their previous chips. We’ve ran many tests using their Phenom II x6 1090T and this new processor can’t even compete with it. I really don’t have the words to convey my disappointment.
We really did have high hopes for this new architecture. Without competition Intel really doesn’t have a reason to continue to push the envelope. AMD is the company that is supposed to provide that competition and they fall really short of the mark with their new Zambezi processors. This processor isn’t the 8150 that we would have liked to have tested, but this processor should at least compete with the i5 2500k for the price that they are asking for it. There is just no way that this processor is able to do that. In the Prime 95 test that we ran the Bulldozer was able to stay cooler than the i5, but I’d like to believe that this is probably an anomaly in the way that Prime 95 was utilized by the AMD processor. The reason I feel this way is because we did see higher temperatures on the Bulldozer when we ran other tests.
