Pros: Cool at stock. Much OC headroom
Cons: Weak at stock frequency, stock cooler a joke
I have beat this CPU to death with testing, benching, tuning, and stressing. Well, not quite to death. It still works fine. It's actually the longest I've owned a single CPU model in a while now, going on 9 months.
Two years ago, when I built my Thuban rig with a 890FX motherboard I was delighted to see that it was also going to support AM3+ CPUs. Naysayers kept trolling on about how the AM3+ CPU pins wouldn't fit, and how it needed a black colored socket, lol. I have had about half a dozen Phenom II CPUs to play around with by this point, so I was anxious to try the latest offering. But I wasn't about to invest into the $300 FX-8150. Instead I picked up the nerfed $100 model known as the FX-4100.
I was obviously not expecting this $100 quad core to exceed performance of my $170 mighty Thuban. but this was something new. Something I had to play with.
The first thing I noticed was that it ran extremely cool at stock. So cool, that it threw up erroneous temperatures in Core Temp. I couldn't get accurate temperatures until I juiced it with some overclocks. Too bad at the stock frequency it was seriously lagging the minimum FPS in Dragon Age. I ran a few quick benches like the CPU physics test in 3dmark11, and the linx FLOPS test. Sadly it was performing not much better than my unlocked Sempron 130.
Overclock time. Right away it was handling my 2x4BG of DDR3-1600CL9 much better than my Phenom IIs could, taking it up to 1800MT/s at CL8.Bandwidth improved, but apparently L3 cache latency is much worse. This particular chip clocked stable up to 4200MHz on stock voltage, and was still running cool, not breaking 35C with a Hyper 212+. With a healthy voltage bump I settled on 4500MHz for a 24/7 clock, since it was still cool at that speed, barely pushing 40C under stress. To hit 5000MHz I needed to use a much higher voltage to remain stable, and I was even able to stabilize 5125MHz, but stress temperatures at this point were 65C. I was able to push my CPU-NB to 3000MHz for my 24/7 clocks with a good voltage bump. I am currently running my RAM at DDR3-2000 CL8.
While performance at stock speed was downright sucky, performance improved quite a bit once things were tuned up. It's just about as fast as my old Phenom II 955 now, which I had paid about $160 for a few years back. So ok, meh I guess, lol. What is more interesting is that performance scaled even better when I tested around 5GHz. If AMD can patch up the leakage issues and deliver the next version of this chip at those clocks, they could have a real winner, much like the original Phenom progressed to the beloved Phenom II rev C3 and E0 steppings.
I'm giving it a 3.5 score. At the time, it cost about the same as the Phenom II 960T, a superior processor. It is also slower than intel chips at the same price when at stock speeds. This chip does have a lot of headroom though, and does improve performance when overclocked. At 4.5GHz, it was enough to enjoy my games at the highest settings without the minimum FPS falling off a cliff. But at stock speeds, it isn't any faster than my Athlon II x4s. You aren't going to get much use out of the stock cooler that came with this chip. Something like a Hyper TX3 would be plenty to overclock this though.
Two years ago, when I built my Thuban rig with a 890FX motherboard I was delighted to see that it was also going to support AM3+ CPUs. Naysayers kept trolling on about how the AM3+ CPU pins wouldn't fit, and how it needed a black colored socket, lol. I have had about half a dozen Phenom II CPUs to play around with by this point, so I was anxious to try the latest offering. But I wasn't about to invest into the $300 FX-8150. Instead I picked up the nerfed $100 model known as the FX-4100.
I was obviously not expecting this $100 quad core to exceed performance of my $170 mighty Thuban. but this was something new. Something I had to play with.
The first thing I noticed was that it ran extremely cool at stock. So cool, that it threw up erroneous temperatures in Core Temp. I couldn't get accurate temperatures until I juiced it with some overclocks. Too bad at the stock frequency it was seriously lagging the minimum FPS in Dragon Age. I ran a few quick benches like the CPU physics test in 3dmark11, and the linx FLOPS test. Sadly it was performing not much better than my unlocked Sempron 130.
Overclock time. Right away it was handling my 2x4BG of DDR3-1600CL9 much better than my Phenom IIs could, taking it up to 1800MT/s at CL8.Bandwidth improved, but apparently L3 cache latency is much worse. This particular chip clocked stable up to 4200MHz on stock voltage, and was still running cool, not breaking 35C with a Hyper 212+. With a healthy voltage bump I settled on 4500MHz for a 24/7 clock, since it was still cool at that speed, barely pushing 40C under stress. To hit 5000MHz I needed to use a much higher voltage to remain stable, and I was even able to stabilize 5125MHz, but stress temperatures at this point were 65C. I was able to push my CPU-NB to 3000MHz for my 24/7 clocks with a good voltage bump. I am currently running my RAM at DDR3-2000 CL8.
While performance at stock speed was downright sucky, performance improved quite a bit once things were tuned up. It's just about as fast as my old Phenom II 955 now, which I had paid about $160 for a few years back. So ok, meh I guess, lol. What is more interesting is that performance scaled even better when I tested around 5GHz. If AMD can patch up the leakage issues and deliver the next version of this chip at those clocks, they could have a real winner, much like the original Phenom progressed to the beloved Phenom II rev C3 and E0 steppings.
I'm giving it a 3.5 score. At the time, it cost about the same as the Phenom II 960T, a superior processor. It is also slower than intel chips at the same price when at stock speeds. This chip does have a lot of headroom though, and does improve performance when overclocked. At 4.5GHz, it was enough to enjoy my games at the highest settings without the minimum FPS falling off a cliff. But at stock speeds, it isn't any faster than my Athlon II x4s. You aren't going to get much use out of the stock cooler that came with this chip. Something like a Hyper TX3 would be plenty to overclock this though.
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