Product Specifications
General
Brand Name : AMD
Item Height : 5.12 inches
Item Width : 3.35 inches
Processor
Processor Socket : Socket AM3
Processor Count : 8
Additional Specifications
Wattage : 125 watts
Technical Details
- Overclocking capabilities - Unlocked for a big boost in performance and speed.
- "Bulldozer" architecture - Designed to increase core communication for unparalleled multitasking and pure core performance.
- AMD Turbo CORE Technology - A burst of speed for the task at hand. Delivers dynamic core performance boosts depending on users' workload at frequencies of up to 900MHz faster.
- AMD OverDrive software - Tuning controls to push performance to the limits and monitors system stability when overclocking
- 32nm die shrink - Stable and smooth performance with impressive energy efficiency
- Advanced Instruction Support - accelerates a new generation of applications:SSE3, SSE4.1/4.2, AVX, AES, XOP, FMA4
- Larger Caches - increase everyday performance with support up to 8MB L2 Cache and 8MB L3 Cache
Product Description
Experience responsive game play and mega-tasking performance with AMD FX Processors. Get AMD FX in your system.
Customer Reviews
By girlboxer5
Let me just preface this review by saying I'm only reviewing this processor based on my own experience, not by benchmarks, which, by the way, seem to be sorely lacking for this particular processor.
I've upgraded from an Athlon II X4 630, and I'm running the processor on an ASUS M5A87 motherboard with the 0701 BIOS update. Updating the BIOS via ASUS' utility was a little nerve-wracking, but ultimately painless, and the FX-8120 works flawlessly with it. Installation of the processor with stock cooler was also reasonably painless, though the lever on the cooler didn't exactly function intuitively, and the pictures in the manual were useless. I had to watch a YouTube video just to make sure I was doing it right. This doesn't matter, though, because you don't want to use the stock cooler, even if you're not overclocking. Trust me.
The big minus to this processor is the utterly hideous stock cooler. At idle, it's dead silent, true. Idle temperatures were 18 degrees C for me. Watch a YouTube vid, fire up a virtual machine, listen to an album in Media Player, or stream something from Netflix, and you'll hear a really loud whir that doesn't stop until a few seconds after you've stopped your minor activity. My old Athlon II X4's cooler sounded like that when I'd been gaming for an hour or two. And gaming... The first night after I installed the processor, I played the new Dungeon Siege 3 DLC and my computer sounded like a shop vac. My husband even complained about the noise. The next night, as I was trying to figure out some sort of solution, I discovered it got almost as loud playing Torchlight! Don't think you can snap in a new fan on the cooler to stop the noise, because it won't be as efficient as AMD's vacuum cleaner fan. Believe me, I tried. I'm now using the Cooler Master Hyper 212 Evo, and it's fantastic; I idle at 13 degrees C, and peak gaming temperatures are around 42 degrees C. It's also reasonably quiet, about as loud as my old Athlon II X4's cooler during gaming. Plenty of other aftermarket coolers are out there, so maybe you'll find something even better.
This leaves me with the pluses. I can't even begin to list them, honestly. This has been an utterly fantastic upgrade for me; everything's faster, and I didn't think my old processor was slow.
First, the stuff I never considered. The time from the Welcome screen on Windows 7 to usable desktop is about 10 seconds faster. I remember reading much merriment about how quick decompression and compression of files was the only thing the Bulldozer processors had over their Sandy Bridge counterparts. As someone who downloads a lot of zipped files from Jamendo, Bandcamp and archive.org, this was actually a huge selling point. Unzipping a file is about three times faster than my old Athlon II X4: most files unzip in less than a second with 7-Zip. MSE's quick scans are about 15 seconds faster on average, and MalwareBytes' quick scans are about 30 seconds faster. Word 2010 loads my giant fantasy novel from hell and finishes its spell-check and page count processing in half the time. My Ubuntu VM on VirtualBox feels like it's running on native hardware. I have 160GB or so of mp3s organized in single album folders, and my old Athlon II X4 would take at least a couple of seconds to display the first screen of files in Windows Explorer. I can access them without delay with this processor. Javascript-heavy webpages load instantly, no matter what browser I use.
Gaming is where I really expected to see most of the boost, and I haven't been disappointed at all. Every game I play loads noticeably faster, and internal menus in any game's UI don't lag at all, unlike on my old processor. Benchmarks have been utterly useless for me in this arena, because I don't play the FPS and racing games that are typically benchmarked. Dragon Age: Origins is extremely smooth, and the 1.03 version with long, slow load screens isn't slow anymore. Dungeon Siege 3 is fluid and gorgeous, without the occasional stutter I'd have when moving the camera or accessing the UI menus. Older games play well with this processor: I've had no issues with KOTOR or Silverfall. A word of warning: I've read that some of the newer Steamworks games have had bluescreen issues, such as Portal 2, Total War: Shogun2 and Deus Ex: Human Revolution. I'm not sure if this has been fixed yet: the Steam client just updated Steamworks a few days ago, but the release notes were spotty, and I haven't read anything about the issue being fixed. I haven't experienced any issues with my Steamworks games.
If I could, I'd deduct half a star for the horrible stock cooler. Seriously, it's unusable for anything beyond surfing the web. But other than that, this processor really deserves five stars from me. I've seldom been so happy with an upgrade, beyond upgrading to my HD 6870. If you have an Athlon II X4 630 or slower, an AM3+ motherboard, and some dollars to spare, this is a no-brainer.
Add to Cart
0 comments:
Post a Comment