AMD FX 8120 Boxed

Zitat: Sadly, its more of the same bad news for AMD or anyone with a Socket AM3+ motherboard looking for a decent CPU for around the £150 mark. The FX-8120 just isn´t a good choice when it comes to the kind of applications we run on our PCs. It´s regularly outpaced by far cheaper Intel dual-core CPUs, while the similarly-priced Intel Core i5-2400 is significantly faster in many of our tests. It´s not all bad news for AMD - before we get accused of being biased towards Intel, we have no qualms recommending the A8-3870K for those looking to build a budget gaming PC, while we also recommend many of its graphics cards. As it stands, the FX-8120 will have to be a lot cheaper for it to be worth considering over an equivalently-priced Intel setup, while owners of the Phenom II X6 1100T Black Edition can rest assured that there aren´t any worthwhile upgrades yet.

Zitat: It´s a niche product and Intel´s processors are generally faster, but this good-value Bulldozer chip is still the king of multitasking

Zitat: Pluss: + Pris + Overklokkingsvennlig Minus: - Jevnt over litt laber ytelse - Høyt effektforbruk og stor varmeutvikling - Ingen integrert grafikk

Zitat: The CPU presentation box is very special, much more interesting than the solution chosen by Intel; the included CPU cooler is pretty loud and we recommend acquiring a custom cooling solution right from the start. By using a high-end air CPU cooler, we have succeeded to overclock up to 4480MHz, without exceeding the recommended temperatures from AMD, at about 1.4V. As other reviewers in the past, we seemed to hit a wall after this frequency, when a lot more voltage is needed to acquire very little extra MHz. The motherboard offered in the combo, ASUS M5A99X EVO offers plenty of options inside the UEFI and also comes with tools meant to help people non-familiar with overclocking. Most of the settings can be also modified with the supplied AI Suite II software, which also comes with monitoring tools. Now regarding the performance: we weren’t expecting a lot from the CPU considering the previous reviews and tests; the FX-8120 performances are under the stock clocked 2500K most of the times and seems to get nearer only when running heavily threaded applications; in games, the difference is not big because we ran our tests only with a VGA card installed, but when we are talking about a SLI/CrossfireX setup, 2500K may begin to declare its supremacy again. We also had some interesting experiences during the test period: when we have tried to launch the Crysis benchmark, we were welcomed with a black screen and the machine was standing still; after pressing Alt+Ctrl+Del, we have observed that the application crashed in the background. After this incident, to make sure that there is not another process bothering the benchmark, we killed through Task Manager all other unnecessary running processes and tried again with the same result. Even after restarting the system and trying again the problem did not disappear so we hit the Web; we have seen a lot of other people using Bulldozer CPUs experiencing the exact same problem, even with Crysis Warhead; some workarounds exist for making the game work, but we think that problems like this shouldn’t appear in the first place. In some cases, the problems were solved by flashing a different, older motherboard UEFI so it may be fixed in the near future. Also, we wanted to try out of curiosity higher frequency memory in the system, a GeIL 2400MHz kit; while with two modules out of four the system worked perfectly fine at the stock memory frequency, we had difficulties making it work with all four modules installed (the system did not freeze but Windows was restarting at the logo). To make this CPU more attractive, AMD has lowered the FX-8120 price significantly to a point where we think that it can be considered a good mainstream variant, especially for people that want to have a completely unlocked CPU, without the need of paying extra. Also, there is a little promotion going on for a limited time (ends 31st of August), which gives users a partial refund on their purchase of qualifying products; in our case, the 8-core FX-8120 is in for the maximum discount available, 20 Euros. The FX-8120 CPU can be found in stores for about 155 Euros, while the 2500K is available for about 205.9 Euros.