The AMD Bulldozer architecture certainly has its advantages when the applications can utilise all of the cores and threads when you compare it to their older Phenom II range of processors. However, in certain games, it does appear to perform worse. Even though they were running at nigh on identical speeds, the Phenom II still has the edge in gaming which is a shame.
Lets talk about the results. As demonstrated in our benchmarks, many of them favour as many cores as you can chuck their way. The more the merrier in that case so the AMD Bulldozer architecture has an easy win in the bag. When it comes down to the gaming benchmarks which we ran, the advantages are not so obvious and in some cases, the CPU actually performs worse when compared to its four year old brother, Phenom II.
Power consumption is definitely on the decline which is good to see - but the story changes when you overclock the CPU. As mentioned previously in the power consumption part of this review; the idle power usage at stock is roughly 26% lower than its Phenom II counterpart, and it is roughly 15% lower when the system is overclocked. Once you start to overclock and put the system under CPU under 100% load, the story changes. Although there is a difference of 0.1v between the two chips, the power hungry Bulldozer CPU catches up with the Phenom II and the margins decrease dramatically.
However, lets cut to the chase and give you our view on the processor. The AMD Bulldozer FX-8120 CPUs have twice the amount of cores compared to the Intel equivalents. It uses more power. It does not perform very well in the gaming benchmarks which we have put the system through and it still remains nowhere near as powerful as anticipated. Although we have not included any direct comparisons in this review, we can compare it to our previous reviews of the 3570K and 3770K review which we posted earlier this year.
The power consumption on the AMD Bulldozer FX-8120 compared to the 3770K as it is at a similar clock speed in our previous review, we cannot directly compare them as there is a different PSU in use, and a different GPU which will plague a fair game if we were to do a direct comparison. Instead, we will compare the difference between idle and load wattage as only the CPU was stressed when we take our measurements. On the AMD system, there is a difference of 184w between the idle and loaded states. In direct comparison, there is only a 138w difference between the idle and load states of the Intel Core i7 3770K. By my calculations, that works out to a 25% difference in power usage. Obviously these are just rough numbers due to different PSUs being used in each system but I think a variance of 2 to 3 per cent at best would be the difference we would see. So essentially, it is anywhere from 22 to 28% less power efficient than the Intel CPUs.
Although there are some very distinctive improvements in performance over the four year old generation known as Phenom II, there are still some issues that AMD need to iron out. The main improvements are in multithreaded applications, simply because there are more cores and threads to do the work. The gaming performance needs to improve drastically if they want to be in any shape to compete against Intel. As it currently stands, a four core Intel Core i5 3570K outperforms this eight core AMD Bulldozer CPU in almost every single test, because the IPC is so much higher in comparison.
Even though the AMD Bulldozer FX-8120 features twice the number of cores when compared to the Intel Core i5 3570K, it still cannot compete against it. At stock speeds, the AMD chip averages roughly 60FPS less than the Intel chip in the first passing - but it is on par with the Intel chip in the second passing of the test. Once the CPU is overclocked, the story remains the same with roughly 60FPS between AMD and Intel in the first pass and ever so slightly faster in the second pass.
Time to wrap up this rather long winded conclusion. If you are in the market for a new system, and you have nothing to upgrade from, it is extremely difficult to recommend this processor over the Intel Core i5 3570K. Granted it does cost more, roughly 35% more for the CPU alone, and whether that difference in performance is worth it to you is entirely up to you at the end of the day. To us, it makes perfect economical sense to get the Intel chip over the AMD chip as it uses less power which will save you money in the long run. It also stands in its own league of performance and unfortunately, AMD have yet to give us anything to come close to it. AMD was hyped up and they were making it sound as if this was a true Intel trouncer. Unfortunately, it did not live up to the hype. Realistically, AMD should be able to match Intel with their Westmere CPUs which are now four years old. They do not come close to it.
In my views, the days of AMD being a high performance competitor in the industry are coming to an end unless they really work their magic with Piledriver. We will be doing a very thorough comparison between Bulldozer and Piledriver, when it arrives.
Unfortunately, due to all of the downsides of Bulldozer, we personally feel that it deserves no more than a bronze medal. It had so much potential but ultimately, it failed to deliver.
Pros
+ Improved idle power consumption over Phenom II
+ Nicely packaged
Cons
- Struggles to match a four year old design
- Uses a lot of power
- Poor performance/watt ratio
- Gets defeated by CPUs with half the cores
+ Improved idle power consumption over Phenom II
+ Nicely packaged
Cons
- Struggles to match a four year old design
- Uses a lot of power
- Poor performance/watt ratio
- Gets defeated by CPUs with half the cores